I think google is actually a web directory or portal masquerading as a search. At least that's how I use it, and I suspect most people do. I generally know the internet sites where I want to get information, and I'm definitely not using google to discover then. Google lets me deep dive to a site and content, saving a step vs going to the site, and probably searching better than a site's native search. Stack Overflow is the archetypal example of this. And Google's pretty good for it, once you learn to dodge some ads and spam. At the same time, the internet is mature, so most people are doing less site discovery and going back to a set of regulars, so the deep link portal model serves people well

Otoh what Google's terrible at is finding new sites with interesting content. If you don't already know where your going, you mostly end up in spam land. I'd like to see a search that addresses that.

I tried to start this project before leaving Yahoo. At least in my orbit, no one was interested. I could’ve done a poor job of communicating the idea but there was/is too much churn after the Apollo acquisition.

I bet GPT-3 let loose to crawl the web could whip up something like the original Yahoo hierarchal, curated directory structure pretty quickly. It wouldn't be as good as employing dozens of people to actually read and rank websites, but it would be a start.

Browsing through directory trees is complimentary to search, and has its own power for surfacing unexpected connections, i.e. information you didn't necessarily know you were looking for. I would love to see something well maintained like that again.

Absolutely agree. I loved DMOZ and was a faithful volunteer for several years. Maybe the time has past and it would be too ripe for gaming the system. Finding dedicated volunteers that "stick to the mission" would be the key. Not sure how possible that is in today's world. Back then we didn't really think about providing this free labor to some company. We were just grateful that someone was hosting such a thing and we had the chance to contribute.

We are coming in full circle hard. I started using newsletters aggressively - it's a good way to keep on top of your interests.

Mastodon is similar to the old decentralized discussion boards - each server run by its own admins, and specific to a set of narrow topics.

Agree. That would also help to discover random interesting things.

The question is if it should be human/user curated, or automatically generated with e.g. some AI.