The Discovery Problem Is Bigger Than Search - Spherical Cow Consulting

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The Discovery Problem Is Bigger Than Search

Heather Flanagan<br>June 2, 2026June 1, 2026<br>Deep Thoughts, Podcast

The Discovery Problem Is Bigger Than Search

"At a recent Identity Salon meeting, I found myself stuck on the word ‘discovery.'"

It came up when talking about accounts. It came up again when talking about AI. It came up yet again when talking about information.

That’s a lot of discovery.

When I lived more fully in the world of research and education federation, discovery usually meant helping an end user find their identity provider. The user wanted access to a service, the service needed to know where to send them to authenticate, and the discovery process helped bridge that gap. In scholarly publishing, discovery often means something else: helping the reader get to the content they are looking for. Same word. Different problem.

Or at least, that is how I had been treating it.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized I had been thinking about discovery inside localized problem spaces. Federation discovery. Content discovery. Account discovery. Credential discovery. Agent discovery. Each area has its own vocabulary, assumptions, tooling, and governance model. That makes sense. People solve the problem in front of them. Of course they do. The right answer depends on what you are trying to find.

Mostly.

The part I needed to remember is that this is not just about me, or the groups I work with, or the systems we try to make easier to find, navigate, or trust. Discovery is a much broader problem. People are trying to find and track information scattered across accounts, platforms, protocols, archives, feeds, wallets, inboxes, and systems they may not even remember using. The localized problems are real. They are also pieces of a much larger pattern.

A Digital Identity Digest

The Discovery Problem Is Bigger Than Search

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The Internet has a discovery problem.

Not because search is broken. Search still works quite well for many things. If the information is public, indexed, reasonably well-described, and close enough to the words you know to use, search remains astonishingly useful. I am not here to complain that search engines no longer work because they sometimes insist on showing me twelve product roundups, three Reddit threads, and a suspiciously cheerful AI summary before I get to the thing I actually wanted. Though, for the record, I am not delighted by that either.

The problem is that search is only one form of discovery. And many of the things we now need to discover do not behave like web pages.

They may be private accounts. They may be credentials in wallets. They may be identity providers. They may be claims. They may be institutional relationships. They may be software endpoints. They may be AI agents. They may be pieces of information buried in Slack, Discord, Teams, a customer portal, a password manager, a cloud drive, an email archive, a browser profile, or some system you used exactly once in 2018 and have not thought about since.

Search helps when the thing can be searched.

That is a much narrower condition than we sometimes admit.

More information is not the same as better discovery

One reason discovery feels harder is obvious: there is simply too much information.

That statement is so familiar that it risks becoming meaningless. “Information overload” sounds like one of those problems everyone recognizes and then promptly ignores because the answer is supposed to be something like “manage your inbox better” or “turn off notifications.” Fine advice, as far as it goes. Not exactly a structural solution.

A recent systematic review of strategies for managing information overload defines the problem as cognitive strain caused when the amount of information exceeds a person’s ability to process it. The review found that responses to overload fall into several categories: personal strategies such as filtering and avoidance, organizational and technical solutions...