If I remember correctly, Yahoo started exactly like this - curated communities and subsets made of links with perhaps a couple of sentences about each site. I think I might have had a handful of communities back then.
I think it’s an interesting for a bespoke community where people are experts on a set of areas and create essentially catalogs. It can’t compete at scale, of course.
This project makes me wish we were all still using something like del.icio.us to organize and favorite our websites. I suppose it would be a privacy nightmare today and would be overrun with bots. I just miss the whole tagging (vs nested folder) way of organizing notes and personal libraries. Like a building a personal multidimensional Dewey decimal system.
Tagging used to be the cool way to solve these kinds of library/search problems and you found it more developed and more often in note taking, web favorites, recipe collecting, email, personal library cataloguing, photo collections, etc. I suppose it feels a bit clunky compared to the natural language search people have gotten used to. But, I liked browsing by tag clouds. And natural language searching has always felt worse to me than using more structured search syntax more like an SQL query than a question. I always hated Ask Jeeves and Clippy and now it feels impossible to navigate the Internet without interacting with their mutant descendants.
This seems like a really cool project. The results returned by the conventional search engines are so bad now because of the usual enshittification and also because the internet has become so clogged with AI-generated SEOed garbage. These human-curated directories may have some advantages again. Thanks for sharing.
A semi-curated website directory sorted by language, topic, subtopic. I haven’t seen anything like it for a long time.
Excite and Yahoo both had directories like it back in the day, when boolean was needed for productive web search, and natural language web searches were not yet a thing.
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