[shituonui]

It works really, really well for libraries. Research libraries (and research librarians) are phenomenally valuable. I've missed them any time I'm not at a university.

Both curators and algorithms are valuable. This goes for finding books, for finding facts and figures, for finding clothes, for finding dishwashers, and for pretty much everything else.

I love the fact that I have search engines and online shopping, but that shouldn't displace libraries and brick-and-mortar. Curation and the ability to talk to a person are complementary to the algorithmic approach.

[dragonwriter]

> It works really, really well for libraries

It scales extremely poorly. It works very well for situations where there are customers/sponsors are willing to spend lots of money for quality, because then the cost scaling doesn't matter as much; research libraries, Lexis/Nexus Westlaw, etc. all do this, but it's not cheap, and the cost scaling with the size of the corpus sucks compared to algorithmic search.

It is among the approaches to internet search that lost to more purely algorithmic search, because it scales poorly in cost.

[thoughtstheseus]

+book stores. Curators can use algorithms to help them curate… Google’s SE is taking signals from poor curators imo.