is it time... to build more (vertical) search engines?

aka a few thoughts on why I think NYT Cooking may be one of the most important ~publishing things~ from the 2010s

One thing I didn't realize... NYT Cooking is now over five years old!!!

It's a sign of a good product when you can't remember how long you've had it, but it still feels fresh and exciting.

For those who want some nostalgia, the April 2015 press release https://www.nytco.com/press/nyt-cooking-now-available-as-app-for-iphone/

Also... plz read this Times blog post about structured recipe data (it's more valuable than the entire Innovation Report)

How the NYT launched Cooking by making sense of its mess of data: 17,507 recipes, 67,578 steps, 142,533 tags and 171,244 ingredients https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structured-data-from-recipes-using-conditional-random-fields/

Any guesses as to how large this database is as of May 26, 2020?

over/under 150,000 recipes or 1,000,000 ingredients?

Why does any of the matter? NYT Cooking is...

- a search engine
- reliant on well-funded content (recipes)
- utilizing technology to deliver a 1st class experience
- competing with a monopoly (Google)
- leverages a monopoly (SEO) to attract new customers

Sure... NYT Cooking is also a newsletter, a series of YouTube shows, amazing reporting, and more...

But... at its core... it's one of the best designed search engines for recipes.

This search engine depends on journalism. It depends on real people testing + creating recipes!

tl;dr - NYT Cooking is a search engine that actually helps directly pay for journalists to do their job.

For those still reading (sorry?) who think this is all obvious... great!

Why isn't this more of a default? If you are a publisher who supports a newsroom producing tons of reporting daily, weekly, etc...

Why is search usually an afterthought?

to consider...

- Where does Google deliver an unsatisfying experience?
- How can you leverage Google to market a better service?

... and ...

- How can your newsroom structure complicated data?
- What can you do with that data that others can not?
- How can you do it faster?

I'm excited for the 100s to 1,000s of folks who are hanging a shingle and starting a newsletter, podcast, series, etc...

That said... I think there is a *ton* of opportunity in challenging our current assumptions about when & how we outsource search

I'll end with this...

I don't think any newsroom is going to just take on Google, but I do think more publishers can challenge Google b/c it's stretched a tad thin...

What specific topics, verticals, etc can your newsroom compete with the Googles?