Subset's quest is to deliver a new way to save, share and search. Of these three pieces, search seems like the most ambitious element. "Isn't search a solved problem?" "Haven't we already figured this out?" Not exactly.
Yes, we have phenomenal infrastructure for querying a globally distributed, zetta-scale repository of interconnected information. Yes, we know how to do efficient search at the smallest scales—locally on devices and within closed networks. But that isn't enough. Something's still up with contemporary search.
The results aren't reliable and consistent and the experience differs based on the domain of the query, as well as the technical sophistication of the user. It could be better—and it should be—but there's no guarantee it will be. Of course, a bunch of people and organisations are trying to secure improvements. Their efforts include:
Building an "answer engine" instead of a search engine (see Perplexity)
Swapping search abstractions and UIs for LLM interactions (see SearchGPT)
Making search an explicit private good (see Kagi)
Making traditional, ad-subsidised search less icky (see DuckDuckGo)
Upgrading traditional search with newer technologies (see Exa)
There are other approaches, too—some theoretical and some in-progress:
Enhancing traditional search with first-party user data
Advocating for search as a public good
Inserting humans into the query-result loop in different ways
Creating domain-specific maps of the cozyweb.
Yet to us, all of the above seem to be slightly off. They all run a playbook involving a massive central repository and/or a privileged third-party that mediates access to a civilisational-scale distributed system and its connected data stores.
So, let's ask a question: "How do you do search from first principles?" As Shane Parrish puts it: "A first principle is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot deduce first principles from any other proposition or assumption." Decompose search to its core: when people search, they are attempting to find something. That's fair and hard to refute. But here's where we diverge.
Most of the alternatives above make a fundamental error. They assume that the atomic unit of search is the website. And that such a search must be routed through a hyperobject that straddles society. People search the web. This is only partially true.
People are searching the web because the web is a proxy for other people. People search people. The correct atomic unit of search is not the website but a person. The traces of engagement certain people leave as they traverse the web. However, our current paradigm of search is a dual class landscape that excludes these people.
Our existing bistable system only recognises creators and consumers. But there is a third class of people called curators. There's approximately half a billion of them. They engage more deeply with what they find online. They generate Dunbar goods. They catalyse patterns of sharing. They create ripples of progress and connection. And they do it with no expectation of return or consequent asset. Yet they're overlooked, underserved, and invisible to current search regimes.
Search from first principles doesn't necessarily put them first. But it does allocate curators the same equity as creators and consumers in the great civilisational game of information retrieval. And it does leverage their contributions in a way that vastly improves the efficacy of our existing approaches to search.
Every curator saves a subset of the things they find, and they share those found things in a peer-to-peer fashion via patterns. Right now, that saving and that sharing are illegible and immune to search. We're changing that.
The terrain is shifting and new maps are being drawn. Technological capacities are diffusing at frenetic rates. Everyone is scrambling to orientate to the new reality knocking at our doors. Search is a massive piece of this new reality and it requires a fundamentally different approach.
Our question was, "How do you do search from first principles?" The answer: enable people to search people, not the web.
