My first thought on reading the title was: "It (the long tail ) is obscured/starved by search engines optimizing for the generic,not the peculiar thing I/we are

My first thought on reading the title was: "It (the long tail ) is obscured/starved by search engines optimizing for the generic,not the peculiar thing I/we are looking for " And there it is: >>Web platforms aren’t really focused on serving users—what they really want to do is control users. This almost always requires them to squeeze out niche and alternative views, and force as many customers as possible to follow the herd. >>That’s a useful comparison. Web platforms are herders. And, if you follow the analogy, that makes us all sheep. It definitely seems harder to find specific information than it was a few years ago. How can we get search engines to surface the really obscure information gems? I also wonder -if only ~20% of the people are responsible for almost all of the sales ,what are the other 80% doing ? Seems there should be some fat sales tails to be found in that area. It's almost as if the relentless MBA approach of seeking 'blockbusters' and cutting 'losers' just reaches a local maxima, which although very big, is actually suboptimal. What am I missing here?