Did anyone ever use directories? I remember the search engine. Yahoo had the same.
It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?
It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?
DMOZ was another such classification, originally launched by Mozilla and run for a time by AOL, though it closed in 2017, discussed on HN at the time <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762362> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759032>.
These were both useful and limited. Useful because early Web content-based search sucked. Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection, and only launched in late 1995. Google came along in (late?) 1997 and blew everyone away, I was using it by 1999. There were "sponsored content" directories, but those tended not to gain much traction as they were so obviously inferior in quality. The main directories generally avoided this taint.
The Web was far smaller, far less commercial, much less dynamic (editable / user-contributable sites were extremely rare, blogs barely existed), and pretty eclectic. Organising by category pretty much worked, as content evolved slowly, the total space was relatively small, and highlighting the Really Good Stuff was both useful and tractable. Today that's fairly intractable, though directory-like organisation might be seen in, say Wikipedia or some similar projects.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ>
There are still several online directories, some general, many specialised: