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Long tail of search

This comment on Hacker News

I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local/family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart).

Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.

Discoverability is going to become an increasingly large problem. Leaving aside content locks inside social media services, over and above what the commenter says, Google optimises for recency, page performance, mobile-friendliness. You can no longer filter search results by date range. Organic results are also pushed down the page by structured search results: top stories, news carousels, related search results, travel cards and more, all of which are dominated by publishers that support AMP.

Taken together, this ends up being biased against independent, casual, non-optimised but potentially interesting publishing, not to mention the loss of increasing amounts of old content that exists on the web but with no way to discover them any more.

I find DuckDuckGo better at surfacing non-mainstream results, but my subjective assessment is it’s not as diverse as even Google used to be say ten years ago.