What is the most frustrating part of your online research experience? For me, it is the sheer amount of irrelevant search results that search engines spit out even to the most narrowly-defined query. Often, you know the data is out there (you may have seen it and you are pretty sure what keywords are in the title), but it's impossible to find because, well, there's a lot more garbage that search engines "think" should be prioritized.
I recently stumbled upon a blog post by Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures, where he explains the root of this problem:
The limited availability of attention has become the key new source of economic rents. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are valued in no small part based on the amount of attention they have been able to aggregate, some of which they then resell in the form of advertising. As a result they invest heavily in algorithms designed to present ever more captivating content to their end users in order to monopolize their attention. Sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post that are nominally news sites do the same.
The FANGs (or FAANGs) of the world increasingly look like parasites leeching users' time for their own survival. The recent Facebook stock crash is a reminder that if they stop sucking ever more of people's time, investors will look elsewhere. Thus they keep fighting for eyeballs rather than delivering deep value service to their users (which is also a consequence of the chosen business model, but this is a topic for another time).
The implication for investors is, of course, that they have to fight a wall of noise to find that one piece of information they really need to make a good investment decision. Often, after looking at 2-3 pages of irrelevant search results you get an impression that there is nothing useful beyond what you saw on the first page (after all, the search engine has indexed billions of web pages, if not trillions). But how often did you find something extremely valuable while looking for something else altogether? How can you be certain that the search engine has shown you all there is? Our goal at Avogadro One is to eliminate this uncertainty. Sign up here to find out when our platform becomes available.