Remember the “good old days” of the internet? To book a flight, you had to visit 14 different airline websites. To find a place to eat, you relied on word of mouth. To read the news, you had to manually click through The NYT, BBC, and your local paper every single morning.
Because in a world of infinite choice, the ability to curate is more valuable than the ability to create . At its core, an aggregator is a digital middleman. It pulls (or "aggregates") information, products, or content from multiple sources and presents them in a single, unified interface. aggregator sites
Use them ruthlessly. They are tools for efficiency. But remember—if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product being aggregated and sold. Remember the “good old days” of the internet
They don't make the planes fly, the movies, or the houses. They don't create the original content or products. So, why are they worth billions of dollars? To read the news, you had to manually
Then came the .
We don’t often use the technical term in daily conversation, but you know these sites intimately. Expedia, Google News, Rotten Tomatoes, Trulia, Amazon, and even Reddit are all aggregators.