About this site
Finding and Being Found is an independent publication by Scott Walldren about discovery, judgment, and the systems that decide what gets surfaced, trusted, and chosen.
It began in August 2026 as a place to think in public about a simple problem:
How do you find what you are looking for when the system will not show you its rules?
And how do you become findable when you cannot see who is looking?
The answers increasingly run through search engines, AI systems, marketplaces, reviews, forums, social platforms, and recommendation engines. But the deeper questions are older than any of them.
What makes something worth finding?
How do people decide what to trust?
Why do useful things remain invisible?
Why does being right so often fail to make someone convincing?
The publication draws from search, marketing, technology, psychology, business, magic, literature, and whatever else helps explain how discovery works.
Some of these ideas may eventually become a short book. For now, they are taking shape here, one note at a time.
What you will receive
New essays are sent directly to your inbox, usually once a week.
No feed to refresh. No algorithm to satisfy. No need to remember to come back and check.
Subscribers also receive access to the full archive, including everything already published and whatever comes next.
Think of it less as a newsletter and more as a slowly growing field guide.
About Scott
Scott Walldren has spent more than two decades working in search and digital marketing, helping organizations understand systems that rarely explain themselves.
He is interested in the space between what a system rewards and what people actually need, between being visible and being useful, and between being found and being chosen.
He lives in Sugar Hill, Georgia.
Subscribe
Subscribe to receive new notes as they are published.
The ground will keep moving.
The hope is to get better at reading it.