Check your Pulse #63

Re-organizing the world's information: why we need more boutique search engines

Oct 19

Hi, I’m Sari Azout and this is the the 63rd edition of Check your Pulse, a tech and startups newsletter designed to make you feel human. Today’s issue is sponsored by Endel - an app with personalized soundscapes to help you focus, relax, and sleep. I wrote today’s essay in two sittings using Endel - a game changer. From their vibey manifesto: “Information overload is destroying our psyche” - a combination of Endel and boutique search engines (the subject of today’s essay) might just be what our bodies and minds need. Check your Pulse readers can get one month free, no card needed using this link.

Hi friends, I took a break to birth a human but I’m back.

I now have a baby, a haircut, and a finished essay.

If curation and knowledge management are your thing, head on over to Mirror to read the full essay.

TL;DR:

Curators are the new Google. What started as a well-intentioned way to organize the world’s information has turned into a business focusing most of its resources on monetizing clicks to support advertisers rather than focusing on the search experience for people.
The mission of a company worth ~2 trillion dollars is to “organize the world’s information” and yet the Internet remains poorly organized. In a world of infinite information, it’s no longer enough to organize the world’s information. It becomes important to organize the world’s trustworthy information.
We are far from achieving the grand vision of the Internet. Human knowledge today is a vast ocean of ephemeral and fragmented info, with the best sources near-impossible to find. Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned to you within a second. But we’re now seeing this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance.
Vertical Search aggregators like Yelp, Expedia, Zillow, and Behance fill functionality and relevancy gaps using structured data specific to their industries. But here too, relevance depends on the sociology of the current moment. For example, on Behance, school and location feature prominently as filters, implying that where you live and where you went to school is an important indicator of the quality of your design portfolio. But in a world where talent is being decoupled from credentialism and geography, those filters are losing relevance.
On Yelp, a search for Electricians in Miami yields a page titled “The Best 10 Electricians in Miami, FL” with text underneath that tells me these are Sponsored Results. Do the top 10 electricians in Miami happen to be those that pay Yelp? My mind is doing some serious mental gymnastics. When you monetize via ads, curation takes a backseat to featuring advertisers and platforms end up making ethically dubious design choices that generate massive trust gaps.
A combination of irrelevant filters, ad-based business models, and unconstrained supply has overwhelmed consumers and made it hard to find signal in vertical search aggregators.
The need for signal gives way to curators. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. We’ve accepted the job of the curator as providing a list of links, a song rec, etc.. all inside linear feed structures designed to surface the ideas of the last 24hrs, not accumulate knowledge.
Curation, when thought of in the context of sharing bite-sized, isolated bits in feed-like architectures, is predominantly about entertainment, not utility. It’s not wrong to say there is a market for this kind of curation. What people miss is that this market is already captured by Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.
The solution is better search and better curation, all wrapped in a better business model - a combination I call boutique search engines. Boutique search engines sit at the intersection of vertical search aggregators (think Linkedin, Yelp, Behance, Zillow) and curation platforms (Substack, Tiktok, Twitter).
Searchable, human-curated interfaces will help us move away from ephemeral, time-bound feeds, into contextual, high signal, trustworthy knowledge spaces.
At Startupy I’m building a boutique search engine for startup insights and the people and companies that have them. We have a firehose of insights being created by founders, funders, thinkers and operators, and few people devoted to filtering, organizing, curating and indexing that information. That’s what Startupy does.
Building a valuable boutique search engine will require making countless nuanced product choices. Read the full essay for a detailed breakdown of the questions keeping me up at night. It will be a long journey, but I am invigorated by the process of manifesting the answers into a tool that can help us use the explosion of information to harness our potential as a species, not to keep us scrolling.

READ THE ESSAY

I’ve been on a brain-high writing this and I’m now trying to reconcile this category-defining piece with the fact that Startupy is, at the moment, a personal project that looks more like my own flourishing digital garden and less like a boutique search engine. As I transition to making Startupy my main thing, I’m looking for a Lead Engineer to join me in the front lines of building this new knowledge graph. If that’s you, or someone you know, email me: sari@startupy.world

🙏🏼

Sari

Last Crumb sells luxury cookies in weekly drops that sell out in 20 seconds. Proof that adults are hungry for fun and delight. 🍪

A very good personal website 💻

I got up close and personal with Every. Companies need financial capital. But they also need emotional capital—good energy, positivity, and resilience. Ironically, being surrounded by close friends and having a strong support system is the best source of emotional capital for founders. 📿

Haley Nahman on depression: “In its more severe forms, depression can keep people in bed for days, but my milder strain tends to manifest as an accumulation of insignificant failures. I notice a sock has fallen from the hamper, and I ignore it for days. I leave a cabinet door perennially ajar, even when it bugs me. I abandon a cup on the counter and let sticky juice coagulate in its seams. Though this sort of neglect can register as minor, it represents something fundamental: a kind of mental blindness to optimism, an unwillingness to see my actions as meaningful, and a self-defeating inner monologue that favors stasis above all else.” 🥱

Michael Nielsen on the compliment deficit: “There is this enormous compliment deficit in the world....Almost everybody's friends know a whole lot of really good things about them, that the person doesn't know about themselves." 💯

Marina Keegan was 22 years old when she died in a car crash. Her essay, The Opposite of Loneliness is magic. We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. 🙏🏼

Endel (the vibey sounds app that sponsored today’s newsletter) just released a new soundscape in partnership with Grammy-winning RnB star Miguel. If you missed the promo at the top of the issue, they are hooking up my readers with one month free, no card needed using this link. 👂🏾

The amount of wisdom in this essay on the future of expertise is 💯

I look forward to every issue of the Demand Curve newsletter. There’s too much fluffy startup content out there. This is not that. It’s packed with practical insights and step-by-step playbooks to grow your startup. (sponsored, but trust me when I say it’s worth it) 📈

The single best resource to understand why crypto is blowing TF up. 🔥

This, via Molly Mielke: As technology advances, software will increasingly be chosen not just for how well it addresses its use case, but how it conveys its personality, similar to how we choose our clothes. 👩🏽‍💻

Eugene Wei wrote a banger essay on social graph design (seeded via Ghost Knowledge). Who we follow can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. First you build your graph, then your graph builds you. 👁️

Chris Herd @chris_herd

“We’re returning to the office because our culture is so important” The culture:

I’ve kept this newsletter free, both to spread my ideas as wide as possible and so I don't feel pressured to write when I have nothing to say. I don’t expect you to pay me anything, but if you’re feeling extra thankful, my venmo is @sari-azout

If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:

My name is Sari Azout. I am the founder of Startupy (coming soon). I spend my days thinking, building, and investing at the intersection of Web 3, curation, knowledge management, and the future of work. My mission is to bring more humanity and creativity to technology and business.