Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus

Class 13 - Search // Where do you want to go today?

Apéritif

RFC as koan

Emulator as koan

Themes

Prompts

Description

Episodes: - S4E4 “Tonya and Nancy”, S4E5 “Nowhere Man”, S4E6 “A Connection is Made”

Search versus curation starts to become the next big thing. There is tension between whether it’s more valuable to offer a complex search algorithm versus having experts curate useful links: quantity versus quality. Rover and COMET represent these two perspectives. Although not given as much hype as the Browser Wars (See #14), this tension between the size and complexity of the web and how to provide a portal with meaningful access is an important one.

Today, google reigns supreme in search (and search advertising) to the point of government lawsuit, but social sites have created an evolved form of the curated access to information (even if not the ‘quality’ of experts, as misinfo runs rampant).

Readings