Robin Good: Though I had seen and scooped this article before, I must have not done a very good job of really reading it from back to back. Paul Kedroski, who wrote this over a year and half ago, really captured the historical essence of content curation on the web.

 

This is an absolutely must-read article for anyone wanting to grasp what is happening with content curation on the web, hwile seeing things in proper perspective.

 

He wrote: "What has happened is that Google's ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha.

 

It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance -- in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape.

 

Search results ...so polluted by spam that you often started looking at results only on the second or third page...

 

...

 

There are two things that can happen now.

 

a) We could get better algorithms, which is happening to some degree, with search engines like Blekko and others.

 

b) Or, we could head back to curation, which is what I see happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation again.

 

Think of Twitter as a new stab at curation, but there are plenty of other examples.

 

Yes, that sounds mad. If we couldn't index 100,000 websites in 1996 by hand, how do we propose to do 234-million by hand today?

The answer, of course, is that we won't -- do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation -- not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) -- and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.).

 

We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges' Library of Babylon.

 

The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.

 

In short, curation is the new search. It's also the old search."

 

Must read. 9/10

 

Full article: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-search-algorithm-is-spinning-out-of-control-2011-1

 

 

Via Robin Good