Essays
Writing on search, corpora,
and who the web is for.
Notes from building an independent, quality-gated index — what we keep, what we throw away, and why the answer you were handed looks so confident.
The Missing Stage
Dictionaries and search engines walked the same four stages — selection, coverage, authority, fluency — several centuries apart. One line built an evidence-first stage in 1857. The web went straight from Johnson to COBUILD and skipped it.
Read → StrategyThey Found the Moat
Curation beats scale, and the only advantage left requires letting go. Two conclusions that cannot be reached from inside an incumbent.
Read → RankingWork Backwards From the Garbage
Ranking up requires a theory of quality. Filtering out only requires a theory of garbage — and garbage is structurally obvious.
Read → MeasurementThe Search Box You Can’t Use
The web has a standard for asking a site to find its own page. It works on 1.3% of domains — and the reason is written in their robots.txt. 199,987 domains probed.
Read → ContributionNobody Asked You
The web is missing an enormous amount of what people actually know — not because those people are unqualified, but because there was never a way in.
Read → ContributionThe Slip
A dictionary nobody could write was written anyway, by strangers, one quotation at a time. The people who know a subject aren’t missing from the index for lack of authority — there is no way in.
Read → ManifestoThe Emperor Wears No Clothes
The modern web hands you a confident answer and asks you to admire the finery — there is nothing inside it.
Read → PaymentThe Receipt
On paying the people who wrote the web — free stays free, and the endgame is one bill that dissolves every paywall.
Read → CorpusOpen Shelves
On showing what we keep, and what we throw away — including a published ledger of every page we evict, and why.
Read → The archiveGround That Doesn’t Move
On the part of the index no ranking economy can touch — public-domain canon, primary sources, and archives no one bothered to read.
Read → OwnershipThe Path Is Yours
On owning the trail you cut through what you find — the durable, portable path the ranked list was designed to make you forget.
Read → FreshnessFresh Where It Matters
On spending attention where it counts, letting the rest go, and why keeping less can mean meaning more.
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