Google is very different today. It favors brands over smaller establishments and newcomers. It does not care to index every page. They stopped bringing us “all the world’s knowledge” a long while ago.
They didn’t do this out of malice I imagine. Aside from leaning into what works the most to maximize revenue, they possibly decided they can’t eradicate spam in a way that preserves the upstart newcomer challenger segments.
Google solved a real problem: Spam, manipulation, low-quality content.. but overcorrected by making existing authority the safest default. That protects users from junk, but it also freezes the market.
The ugly consequence for projects like DoshModo or Million Minds AI is that being genuinely useful is no longer enough. A new product often needs some combination of:
- an existing audience
- a founder with distribution
- paid acquisition
- access to a strong community
- or coverage from already-authoritative sites
That is backwards. Discovery should help determine what deserves attention; instead, attention increasingly determines what is discoverable.
There is a useful distinction here:
Search answers: “What is the safest, most established result?”
Discovery answers: “What is new, unusually relevant, and worth noticing?”
Google increasingly optimizes for the first. Product directories claim to provide the second, but most are really SEO marketplaces, launch-day popularity contests, or pay-to-play databases. They are not serious relevance engines.
A better system would need to treat newness as a feature, while still filtering aggressively. For example, it could deliberately reserve exposure for unknown projects, but only after checking signals such as:
- Is there a functioning product or substantial body of work?
- Is the description specific, or generic marketing sludge?
- Are there signs of real users or real development?
- Does it contribute something meaningfully different?
- Is the creator consistently engaged?
- Are recommendations coming from credible people in the relevant niche?
- Has it been copied across hundreds of directory submissions?
The ranking system could even separate results into lanes:
Established, Emerging, and Experimental.
That avoids pretending a two-week-old project has the same trust level as QuickBooks, while still allowing it to be found. Someone searching for “tools to review business spending before bookkeeping” could see:
- Established accounting products
- New products specifically addressing the review workflow
- Independent writing and discussions about the problem
That would be much more useful than ten articles from Forbes, NerdWallet, and accounting companies repeating the same broad advice.
The market does not need another place to submit links. It needs a credible mechanism for unknown work to earn attention.
I’m calling this “discovery engine” because the job changes from:
Find the most authoritative answer.
to:
Find worthwhile things I would otherwise never encounter.
That can include:
- a blog post with an original argument
- a small personal website
- an obscure research project
- an essay
- a new software tool
- a community
- an artist
- a local initiative
- an experiment
- a person doing unusually good work
- an old site that never built conventional authority
The key is that it should not merely search a different set of websites. It should optimize for a different outcome.
A search engine assumes the user already knows what they want and rewards confidence, authority, and relevance.
A discovery engine should also reward things like:
- originality
- specificity
- freshness
- underexposure
- demonstrated effort
- independent thinking
- usefulness to a niche
- unusual connections
- contrarian but well supported
- endorsement from credible people
- sustained quality without large-scale popularity
Unlike Google’s page rank algorithm, this system should reveal its scoring approach and have references to back why it thinks a source deserves attention.
The solution still has to fight spam, self-promotion, AI slop, coordinated voting, and ideological curator bubbles. That is the whole problem. But that is also why it is meaningful. The engine is not just crawling pages; it is trying to create a new system for allocating attention.