Design, Science and Technology

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"