The Phone Book Problem

Do modern search tools hide more than they show?

I love it when the algorithm knows me well enough to make a suggestion I actually appreciate. Specifically: if I’m awake at 3am because I’m a 52 year old woman who has never been a great sleeper, and you show me one adorable pet video after another, I’m happy. That’s the algorithm showing me what it thinks I want.

The problem is that sometimes what we want, as human beings, is to see everything that’s available. Those two things don’t always align. What the algorithm thinks we want, and what we actually want. That misalignment is a big deal in the modern age of discovery.

Let me explain what I mean. I call it the phone book problem.

What a Phone Book Used to Do

In 1988, if you landed in a town you didn’t know, and you wanted to find something, you’d go to a phone booth or a diner or the drawer in your hotel room. You’d look it up in a phone book. Pretty much every person and business was listed. It wasn’t perfect. But it was comprehensive.

Today, when you look something up, you get a weighted suggestion instead. Every directory is trying to guess what it thinks you want. Music platforms. Maps. Restaurant searches. Airbnb. A blind search for “plumber near me.” In my experience, it works poorly.

Searching in Circles

I’ve been traveling this summer. More than once I’ve searched “Mexican restaurant” or “car wash” and gotten directed to a handful of results. Meanwhile I drove right past other places that never showed up. Last week I was standing outside a Mexican restaurant that didn’t appear in my search results. Not until I typed its exact name. It had dozens of excellent reviews. It had been open for years.

The same thing happens with podcasts and YouTube. In the last several months, as I’ve been working on connecting with creators, I often cannot find a show until I look in the exact right spot with the exact title. I’ll search a creator name and show in Google and get nothing. Then I’ll try Rephonic and get nothing. Then I’ll go straight to Spotify and it will appear. The show exists. But the only way to find it is through a direct link or by searching in one specific place. With YouTube, I’m often suggested a video on another platform, and I’ll watch a bit and then want to find it directly on YouTube. Sometimes I can find it. Other times I have to go back and get the exact name of the creator or the video title.

It’s my opinion that the businesses that pay the penalty for this are small businesses, new businesses, and creators. Creators are businesses too. We all suffer the discovery penalty.

The Flywheel Nobody Told You About

People call this a flywheel. That’s a fair description. The algorithm is looking for signals. Proof that content is valuable, and to whom. Content with an established audience already has a massive head start. Anyone without that audience starts invisible. So does anyone without a marketing firm that knows how to fake one.

The standard advice we give podcasters and creators is to work on podcast SEO. Or in YouTube’s case, thumbnails, titles, and keywords. That advice isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t work very well if nobody is searching for those words, or for you.

The real currency is authority and trust. You can build the single best resource on your topic. But if you’re the only one talking about it, you’ll stay invisible. At least until someone else, someone already trusted, talks about you too. The clearest example: when Don Lemon left CNN for Substack and YouTube, his content was visible and viral almost overnight. His name and reputation were already trusted. Plenty of third parties were already talking about him. It’s a catch-22. You need people already looking for you before the algorithm will send anyone your way.

A Warped, Silo’d View of What’s Available

You can see this play out in the physical world too. Attention gets funneled to a handful of places. Everywhere else sits empty. It feels like there’s one cupcake shop in a town that actually has four. Like everyone in the world takes their travel photos from the same corner in Santorini. Like Amy Poehler is the only podcast that exists. None of that is true. It just feels true, because algorithmic suggestion concentrates attention into a few winners.

I first noticed this pattern about ten years ago. I realized my daughter only knew the names of about ten colleges nationwide. There are more than 5,000. Around the same time, I read that small and mid-size colleges are closing for lack of enrollment. Meanwhile the top 100 or so are growing fast. What makes that so frustrating is that almost every kid I’ve talked to would actually be happier at a school of 15,000 students than one of 30,000. The algorithm isn’t matching people to what would make them happiest. It’s matching them to what’s already popular.

This also shows up in what those of us online see day to day. I recently helped my daughter and her friends take graduation photos. They were inspired by friends who’d also taken graduation photos, so we used that inspiration too. My Instagram feed became flooded with graduation photos, all in the same handful of locations. Those weren’t the only locations people were using. The algorithm just flooded me with what it thought matched what I was looking for. It’s a warped, silo’d view of what’s actually out there.

And to be fair, I do love it when Netflix says “if you liked this show, you’ll probably like that one.” When it works, it feels helpful. But there’s a huge gap that gets missed: if you aren’t already known to the algorithm’s flywheel, it’s very hard to get discovered at all.

The Moat Nobody’s Built a Bridge Over

For independent creators and small businesses, this moat of visibility is a massive problem. There are very few tools built to help anyone cross it.

There isn’t a single open directory of “all the podcasts” anywhere. YouTube is the sole keeper of its own catalog. About a year ago, I reached out to Rephonic. It’s a podcast directory that compiles data by scraping other directories. I asked if I could get a list of women podcasters. They said no. They could guess, but they don’t actually track that. The data doesn’t exist.

Podcasting and YouTube are open platforms. Anyone can publish. Which means it’s a tsunami of content. Too much for any human to sort through. It has to be done by machines. It’s easy to point a finger at the platforms that write the rules of search and recommendation. Fair enough. But that’s not what I’m here to do today.

Building the Directory Myself

This is why I started building a directory. An open directory. I’m a woman who creates. I’ve spent years getting stuck at that moat, trying to be found by an algorithmic flywheel that was never built with me in mind. So I’m building something to help fix that. The idea is simple. If the algorithm needs a place to find signals of authority and trust for women creators, then let’s build that place ourselves.

I call it the (un)MUTED Creator Directory.

Right now it has 20 women creators listed. I’m genuinely excited about that number. I can’t wait to celebrate 30. If you’re a woman with an audio podcast, a YouTube channel, a Substack, or a Twitch stream, add your show. Help me get there. Click here to get started.