In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all were originally web directories of this sort.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these websites also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
@ajsadauskas @degoogle Since I run a small directory this is a fascinating conversation to me.
There is a place for small human edited directories along with search engines like Wiby and Searchmysite which have human review before websites are entered. Also of note: Marginalia search.
I don’t see a need for huge directories like the old Yahoo, Looksmart and ODP directories. But directories that serve a niche ignored by Google are useful.
This is a good point - as search is increasingly enshittified too (from top down, with corporate interests, and bottom up, from SEO manipulation and dodgy sites) it makes sense for topics or communities often drowned out by the noise.
I also see you are using webrings - another blast from the past that has it’s uses.
@bradenslen @ajsadauskas @degoogle looksmart! There’s a blast from the past.
As a very early internet user (suburbia.org.au- look it up, and who ran it) and a database guy, what I learnt very early is that any search engine needed users who knew how to write highly selective queries to get highly specific results.
Google - despite everything - can still be used as a useful tool - if you are a skilled user.
I am still surprised that you are not taught how to perform critical internet searching in primary school. It is as important as the three Rs