Swiping is the new Search

Everyone thinks the market for Search is over, and Google won. Not even close!

As IndieHackers, what we need to do is find markets where the keyword-driven Google search is not working, and some other kind of search produces a better user experience.

The classic example is Tinder, which invented the idea of Swiping left and right on a few profiles at a time, inside a dating app. They pummeled their dating site competitors, who were using a Google-style keyword search on dating profiles.

Everyone thought swiping was about dating apps. Nope. Swiping is a different kind of search with unique advantages in certain markets.

A top-down Google search gives you a hundreds of results - more than you can realistically evaluate one-by-one. You get all the results at once, sorted to the top based only on the keywords that you enter. If you run the same search over and over, it doesn't learn your preferences.

Swiping is different.

You can sort through 1000 results 5 or 10 at a time, in the tiny spaces of free time that pop up in your day. Dividing up the time investment lets you see more options.

Even better, the algo can learn more about what you like and dislike - even when you don't know the keywords to use. So if you like people with freckles, it can learn to show you more profiles of people with freckles - - even if you never learn that's why you like person A over person B. Even if you never put that into your search.

Pretty soon, that un-manageable and ever-changing list of people becomes a dialed-in short list of who's been added or newly deemed relevant for you. You can't do that on Google.

An entrepreneur here on IndieHackers is applying Swipe to searching for home buyers. This is amazing! Traditional homebuyer sites use a top-down Google search and deliver too many results. You might get 250 matching houses and have to spend 2 hours poring over the list. Then the next day, you search again and 10 of them are different - but to find them you must look through everything and re-rank your favorites based on this new information.

Swiping is better for real estate. A few minutes a day of swiping, and the algo learns your preferences - even ones you didn't know you had. Do you like ranch houses or bungalows? You don't need to know the search terms. The Algo just learns. Swiping can easily incorporate the new listings and prioritize them in your feed.

Swiping is the new Search. What markets will you apply it to?