Content Curation World

Matt Rosoff writes on Business Insider UK:

"A lot of people think Google Search is like a map: An objective guide to the best and most important material on the internet. It's not.

Google Search is the most important product of a very wealthy and successful for-profit company. And Google will use this product to further its own commercial ends." (Not to help people find the most relevant info to their own learning needs.)

This is an excellent article that should be read a couple of times slowly to remind oneself of Google key aspirations and limits.

In it, the author illustrates with relevant references how Google uses whatever means it has to further the interest and revenues generated by its search engine ad business (AdWords / AdSense).

It also highlights, that like any other dominant, monopoly-like company it risks of being challenged in courts around the world, and this is "what Google desperately wants to avoid. If a government body issues a formal legal ruling that Google Search is an anticompetitive monopoly that needs to be regulated, it opens the floodgates".

Meanwhile Google Search is and will be increasingly challenged by smaller but more relevant, specialist search engines, like Amazon or Yelp.

But Google, hungry by its profit-driven goals, keeps also increasing the amount of information it provides itself inside search results, versus original content and resources that are out there on the web.

In four years time Google has doubled the amount screen real estate that it uses to promote its services or ads.

All of this to say, that Google is a for-profit company and not a humanitarian endeavour built and maintained to provide a true guide to the best information available online. 

For whoever has the interest, passion and skills to search, filter and organise information this is important news. 

There's an opportunity to provide higher quality, better vetted information results than Google presently does. At least in some areas. 

If Google is too busy about serving ads and pushing its own services, there will have to be someone else who can provide to Google, or other search engines, trusted quality search results on specific subject matters. 

As for Google there is one area where it cannot really compete with talented humans: trust. 

True information curators, of the expert kind, may indeed become in great demand in the near future. And personal trust will determine which one you and I will rely on. Whether Google will exist or not.

Right to the point. Informative. 9/10

Full article: http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-is-not-a-charity-2015-3 

Justin Fowler, co-founder of AudioPress, offers valuable insight into what the future of search and curation may be, by providing a relevant and sound pattern to look at: music.

He writes on TheNextWeb:

"Context is key for music, and that is where services like Songza and Beats Music are picking up tips from FM radio. These services are essentially using algorithms to help people discover new playlists, instead of discovering new songs. This allows for a marriage of both technology and human curation."

Accordingly, as time goes by, I expect to see search engines increasingly highlight and direct searchers to quality curators, hubs and on-topic collections and specialized resources, rather than to individual, one-topic-only pages.

Search engines will increasingly be gateways to curators and content collections rather than to individual tracks and pages.

This will be particularly true especially when you will query a topic, a theme or interest, or better yet, a musical genre.

In all of these situations, where you want to dive, discover and learn more about a topic, it is much better to be offered a selection of playlists, compilations, collections or hubs covering that theme rather than a specific song, product or artist.

That is, search and discoverability of content will rely more and more on intermediaries that will take on the load to make sense and organize in the best possible way, a specific realm of information (it can be a music genre, or the analysis of a biological topic) rather than  - as it happens today - provide a linear list of individual web pages that is supposed to cover that topic.

If the music industry, is, like other times before, an early indicator of how things will work out in the future, it makes a lot of sense to expect that the future of content discovery and search will be increasingly in the hands of curators, greatly helped and supported by sophisticated, but hackable and adjustable algorithms.

What do you think?

Rightful. Indicative of things to come. 8/10

Full article: http://trove.com/me/content/Cc1qT

Reading time: 4':20"

The future of search may not just be about Google and Bing. In the future of search, believe it or not, there are going to be a lot of people like you and me who will be providing much more helpful information guidance to specific requests than Google could ever do.

I know this sounds probably unrealistic to you, but I think there are now many good indications that this likely going to happen much sooner than you expect.

One of the key reasons why, human beings will start to reclaim this highly valuable search territory, is the fact that in the last few years we have slowly but deeply surrendered our ability to evaluate, decide and select what is "real" to Google's own algorithms, in ways that can only be detrimental to us.

You have probably read in recent times that Google is moving to use "semantic search" rather than the keyword-based approach it has been using until now. 

Do you know that "in semantic search, the decisions are not based on statistics, but rather on world models"?

"How about searching for "Dictators of the World?" The results, which include a list of famous dictators, are not just the judgment of whether someone is a dictator, but also an implicit judgment of choosing individual examples for the concept of a dictator. 

When building knowledge over concepts such as "Dictator" in the search engines, we are implicitly accepting a set of assumptions."

"It is needed to question and monitor these models, for in the past, the significance was only in the human mind. Now, it is also in the mind of the engines that forward us information. 

The search bears an editorial point of view, and its results reflect this point of view. 

We can’t ignore the assumptions behind these results. The invisible judgments will frame our conscience."

Here is a must read article by Zeh Fernandes, that wants to ignite an open discussion about "how the Google monopoly is affecting the way we search for and receive information on the internet".

I think that this is a topic deserving the highest attention and I highly recommend to read in full this excellent article, especially to content curators, information librarians and any other individual concerned with our future ability to vet, organize and make sense of the ocean of information surrounding us.

Alternative search tools and content curators are the future.

Good reminder of what we are eating daily. Insightful. Eye-opening. 10/10

Read this: http://zehfernandes.com/the-evil-side-of-google/