One of the clearest places to see this problem of ‘too much’ is Yelp. I’ve been fascinated by how many companies are effectively trying to unbundle Yelp, despite that fact that (unlike Craigslist) it’s a modern technology company that does most of the things one would expect it to. But where people unbundling Craigslist generally try to peel off a category and deliver a modern experience, the people going after restaurant listings are often doing so with constraint. That is, instead of giving you every single restaurant that’s within 2 miles and that lots of people liked, they give you 10 restaurants. … People are attacking crowdsourced universal scale with constraint, curation and personal preference.
Looking at these companies, it strikes me that actually, saying that ‘Yahoo’s directory didn’t scale’ misses the point. What we’re really seeing is a trade-off between two problems. You can have a list, solving discovery and recommendation, but once the domain gets big then your list is either unusably long or partial and incomplete (and perhaps uneconomic to maintain). Or you can have a searchable index of everything but you’re on your own working what’s good and finding things you didn’t know to search for.
Search, discovery and marketing from Benedict Evans
Curation also works best in places where taste matters — the “best” book, the “best” restaurant. An algorithm can’t provide social validation beyond “the most popular.” What’s interesting about Yelp is that their focus on user generated content means it’d be hard for them to add sources of curation outside of their users — there’s no list of restaurants with Michelin stars, or James Beard winners, and there probably can’t be one without undermining the core conceit of the platform.