Keyword search and pay-per-click has terraformed the web, and not necessarily in a great way. This beautifully illustrated Verge article is a great place to start to read more into exactly the forces at play here. Ultimately, for end users, finding stuff online feels a lot less like getting good recommendations from a trusted friend, and more like being served the same predictable slop at a bad canteen.
Last week we pushed a feature to our reference client aiming to bring a little more of a sense of curation & agency to the search experience. Instead of searching across the entire internet, you can add websites to the "context bar" just as you would an applet. Now, the client can use websites as tools, and conduct a search across just the sources you pick out.
(For those interested, here's a note I sketched out for how the "kernel" of our client handles sending these various types of tool to the model.)
Also in the last week:
- Our contributor Vinay wrote up brand new getting started docs for Web Applets, which will be dropping later this week
- Thanks to engineer Oli, the web applets inspector now validates JSON
- Ryan, who is joining us part-time on design, has been iterating on brand and vibes. I'm excited to share that work soon