Editorial Surfacing
Show the right content before they know to ask for it.
Editorial Surfacing decides what to put in front of each viewer — without waiting for a query. It ranks items from your corpus using editorial rules, recency, popularity, role, or personalisation signal, and refreshes as context changes. Reach for it when you want users to discover content rather than search for it: homepages, feeds, recommended-reading rails, or role-based dashboards.
Shape
Operational dimensions
Runs without a person in the path.
Fires when an upstream condition occurs.
Holds working state that compounds over runs.
Consumes external data; does not write back.
Inputs
- corpus of items to surface (with metadata and freshness signals)
- viewer context (role, history, profile, time, location)
- ranking policy (editorial rules, recency decay, personalisation model, popularity weights)
Outputs
- ordered list of items selected for this viewer
- per-item relevance or priority score
- surface refreshed on context change or scheduled interval
Mechanism
Ranks and presents items from a corpus without a user-supplied query — choosing what to show based on viewer context, recency, popularity, editorial rules, or personalisation signal.
Why this is a primitive
Cannot be decomposed and is not a composition of corpus-retrieval + ranking. The defining mechanism is rank-without-query: no query input, no user-driven matching — the system itself decides what to put in front of the viewer. Different input signature (viewer context / time / signal) from corpus-retrieval (query string), different load-bearing operation (push-by-policy vs pull-by-relevance). Strip out the rank-without-query and you have a static list.
Where it shows up
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