Thesis: Web3 can’t rely on Web2 search for discoverability

• What has Web2 done well to enable search, discovery?

  • Common taxonomy; title, URL, description

  • Indexing; sitemaps, URLs

  • SERP; predictable search experience regardless of the URL returned and listed

• What can Web3 do to move in this direction?

  • Publish an EIP like draft that can be discussed and reviewed openly

  • Run experiments in a few large Web3 communities [likely DAOs]

Discussion

Many of the Web3 projects lack a common taxonomy to describe their projects.  Lacking a common taxonomy [or language] then results in every project describing their Web3 project uniquely and mixing this uniqueness as a definition for Web3 itself.

Imagine early in the web era [circa 1995] if teams had described their projects as "document viewer" or "links list" or "library catalogue"; which would have lost the meaning of the 'world wide web' and it's network aspects.

And because there's no common taxonomy or language for Web3 it's very hard to construct a common search approach. Yes one could Google for "web3" but those results don't return the essence of what we're trying to find [people searching for Web3 projects]. Instead Google search results will only return what has been meta tagged with "web3" for SEO.

We'll continue to use Twitter Spaces conversations to understand what people are looking for [when they search for Web3]; which will guide how to define a common taxonomy; a framework for search and discovery. The next Spaces is January 12, 1:30 PM Seattle time.