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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

> I long for a curated list of such sites.

I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases.

Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the touch target for their menu is annoyingly small, or they are a little bit cluttered, or use more CPU than I'd like (specific mapping sites).

So it's not easy to fit a perfect list, but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is.

(Also I try to make my own obscure personal sites all the time as my contribution to this mess...)

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My god, the web has become so garbage that we're going back to web directories...

Maybe we should have never left. It's Google search and their advertising that destroyed the web we all used to enjoy.

This is not the case. At least it wasn't the case in the late nineties and early naughts. The web then was full of banner and popup and pop under ads (punch the monkey, remember?). Google was a breath of fresh air then with a clean site and text only ads. No question they strayed from that early vision but they are still far from the worst offenders.

Exactly. After they bought Doubleclick and promised they wouldn't merge the two third-party cookies and the associated data, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. No display advertising ever again!

And the web smelled like roses ever since.

> but they are still far from the worst offenders.

Maybe in the type of ads they show. But don't forget increasingly garbage search results that are also indirectly related to the whole ad-tech business they facilitate.

Which search engine do you find shows better search results? I keep coming back to Google because no one else even comes close to the quality of search results.

That was true even more so when Google started out. Their competition was Yahoo and AltaVista, which were practically useless. I'd argue that Google has done a lot for the web. But I can agree with the sentiment that they took a turn for the worse at some point.

If what you are looking for is primarly better search results and you do not mind paying for it, check out https://kagi.com

Yes, we're "reimagining" web directories.

I doubt they ever went obsolete, insofar as they are essentially categorized lists of links to things...but from a more cultural/ephemeral viewpoint they do hit different. :-)

In my experience, the more subjective they are, the better, so I'm not sure I'd have much use for the generalized kind anymore. The criteria can be way too loose if you're looking to meet a qualitative standard...

Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.

But would anyone pay for it? Basically a relatively closed and essentially almost manually curated web ring seems like it'd offer a lot of value, but who pays?

Maybe it could work if you charge users a super small base fee (let's say $1/month), and charge commercial sites that want to be listed in certain verticals?

I'd be happy to pay per month but if a commercial site can just buy sponsored posts I'm out.

Well I didn't think about it too much but the idea is that the more "salesy" the site (i.e. the further they stray from the ideals of the webring/directory), the higher the price.

Also, I wasn't thinking of a stream-of-posts type thing -- more like private, curated search but I guess having a stream makes sense too.

Either way, the question then becomes would enough people pay whatever monthly fee would keep the site viable (pay for the curation, bandwidth, etc) to prevent the people running the service from making compromises on the vision...

> But would anyone pay for it?

Content owners' greed is ruining the web. Build websites without any intention of monetary gain and you'll find a much better experience in the web.

It's unfair to demand all costs from content generation to hosting to be borne by the "owners." For the web to work better, we need more aligned incentives, not to disregard the understandable demand of creators of websites and services to get somehow compensated. I do find ads annoying but I find the expectation that everything be absolutely free on the internet quite ridiculous.

Also, even when websites are built without any intention of monetization, there are still goals which the creators want to achieve. Some sites are free because they want to change public opinion or facilitate cooperation between groups of people for a common purpose. Others are made to showcase skills or for academic purposes. Lots of people are making all kinds of websites. Some want to be paid and that's fine.

> It's unfair to demand all costs from content generation to hosting to be borne by the "owners."

That's, like, your opinion... man...!

> For the web to work better, we need more aligned incentives, not to disregard the understandable demand of creators of websites and services to get somehow compensated.

I disagree. I think of the web and the internet like art. Nearly all of the (arguably) best art was produced without compensation.

> Also, even when websites are built without any intention of monetization, there are still goals which the creators want to achieve.

Yes, but financial gain shouldn't be the primary motivator. When it is then it has a tendency to corrupt everything.

> Lots of people are making all kinds of websites.

Great!

> Some want to be paid and that's fine.

Not so great!

I was talking about who would pay to gather and curate the content. The larger the ring the more effort it would take, and someone has to run that service/pay something (whether it's money, time or effort) to keep such an effort going and worthwhile.

Curated = the next round of “help I’m being censored”.html

Try https://wiby.me/

Did that here https://teclis.com

Very fun project and still working on expanding the index. The condition to get into the index is no/low bloat/tracking/spam.

I was interested to check this out but it looks like it's offline

Try http://teclis.com

I have an old style HTML (and a little CSS) personal website, but making it responsive (mobile compatible) is a lot of extra work. It would take me a few months spare time to fix all my hunderds of pages.

Even if your site design consist of static table td cells - modern smartphones should be able able to read it, for example Opera mobile browser will realign the text. Old sites tend to be designed for 800x600 screens and that will also be fine on a modern smartphone.

Making a site mobile friendly is tricky as you need to allow users to zoom and change the text size - no element can be static in size. Often old web sites does that by default - while many modern sites think they are printed media.

As an alternative suggestion: don't. The web was fine when you had to zoom in and out. If anything, make it "responsive" with dynamic font-size scaling.

> …but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is.

Would that there were a search engine out there that prioritised the indexing of these high quality ‘well behaved’ sites.

That would be a joy to have.

Interesting it occurs to me that google search could do this, but they have a conflict of interest - adsense.

Million short sort of does this

You’re looking for https://millionshort.com/

I’ve found very many niche sites, blogs, and information dumps with this engine. It’s astounding how much is never surfaced on google or DuckDuckGo.

How do you use it like that? I typed in "falafel" as a test and the first result was JS heavy foodnetwork.com.

You have to tell it how many of the top sites you want removed from the results. For instance you can remove the top 1000 sites and it will remove that foodnetwork.com result.

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