A collection of 2,299 blogs about every topic | Hacker News Reader

A collection of 2,299 blogs about every topic

ooh.directory

120 pointsraytopia18 comments

Fascinating. Search engines are so bad, that we are going back to the pre-search engine era of pages of hand-curated links.

At this point it may be necessary. All of the search engines are essentially the same now and all you can find are mostly a handful of curated e-commerce sites. The "wide" part of the web has all but disappeared.

This is true for stuff that can be sold, but for example my personal blog has most search traffic going to a page about a cartoon theme song.

People still rely on search engines for a bunch of things beyond "best phone 2024".

Things like "best phone 2024 reddit".

J/k, I don't disagree.

with the explosion of AI generated content to meet SEO criteria that may be the only way to have proper access to real content

This reminds of the World Wide Web circa 1993. Yahoo was a kind of categorized link directory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

https://web.archive.org/web/20141122194515/https://dir.yahoo...

I never really used anything pre-google so I dont have enough context.

The yahoo directory page, i found, is very useful for discovery. I spent a good amount of time digging into sub-directories of recent interest for example [0] and found the limited number of links very very refreshing and of high quality. Links work, no ads, and i skipped what i did not think useful without fatigue. 10 mins later, i learned something new.

Google search for the same topic lends 2 screen fulls of ads and a popup asking for permission for my location and then this[1] garbage. 10 mins later, I had just spent time avoiding ads and paid content slop.

A very basic example of why "google it" isn't a great tool for discoverability any more. Simpler tools, better outcomes.

A modern looking, but fundamentally same concept of a categorized, curated directory could very well be an improvement over the current state of affairs.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20141122222807/https://dir.yahoo...

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=homeschooling

Many thanks for this other cheek. I had no idea they maintained that until 2014!

Yes, exactly what I thought.

Previous discussion (Nov 2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719983

https://ooh.directory/search/?q=furry

Ah damn, I'm the only one so far?

Someone's gotta be first. You're paving the way for others!

How do people make use of such an aggregator? Do people checkout blogs individually and subscribe to feeds to individual blogs or interest? The sheer number of the collection dissuades me. I'm wondering, instead, if it'd be useful for the aggregator to offer an aggregated feed itself, but that might be too rand om a feed and subjects!

Such a great resource.It’s incredibly valuable for me personally since I’m always hunting for new blogs and new people to interview for my series. I also interviewed Phil, the creator of ooh back in February: https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-phil-gyford

Guess they aren't a fan of fuzz pedals:

https://ooh.directory/search/?q=big+muff

Absolutely awesome ... an oasis in a hostile desert. We needs more webrings and curated link portals (which this essentially is) ...

Thank you devs!

I would love an opml with everything.

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