In the beginning there was curation, and it was good. People found interesting things on the web, created directories of those things, and then you found what you were looking for inside those curated lists. That was the origins of the original lists and directories, from Yahoo on outward.

But then that got too hard. The web got bigger faster than anyone could keep track. Curation steadily gave way to algorithmic search, which at first was just spidering of the web, and then more intelligent spidering with keywords. And then it became Google, with ranking algorithms that placed websites into a hierarchies of keyword-related relevance based on things like authoritativeness, as defined, in part, by links from other sites — by those original hand-curated lists, ironically enough.

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