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When web directories like Yahoo lost out to web search engines like Google, we lost something crucial. While search is good for answering questions you know how

When web directories like Yahoo lost out to web search engines like Google, we lost something crucial. While search is good for answering questions you know how to ask, browsing was exploratory and led us to know what we didn't know. When it comes to learning a complex topic like mathematics, this kind of serendipity was very useful. There are some amazing resources on the web, but googling won't let you discover those. Sometimes, the same idea is available in a book, in a TED talk, and in a podcast. Some of us are curating such resources categorized by topic / format / year / difficulty / estimated time. Our GitHub repo received 100+ stars in less than a week, so I thought it would be a good time to show it to HN. I'd love to get some feedback and critique from the HN community where I have learned and discovered so much. Here's the Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604295

kickscondor 8y ago
'Awesome' directories have really given a nice resurgence to the Yahoo! style of organization. I think the problem with Yahoo! is that it simply got too big to be used as a directory. Niche directories are where it's at. (Also: Reddit wikis, which often are used similarly.)
- teleclimber 8y ago
  > Niche directories are where it's at. Agreed. And if we came up with a standard format for such lists you could make them searchable and we could end up with distributed searchable curated indexes that are not centrally controlled. And that is quite compelling compared to centralized fully algorithmic search systems run by mega-corps.
vagab0nd 8y ago
Adding to that, I sometimes fear that my Google search results are biased towards my own search history.
qnsi 8y ago
What's the point of saying "We have collected links for [...], relationships, [...]. When there are 0 links collected under relationships? Seems weird for me

kickscondor 8y ago

'Awesome' directories have really given a nice resurgence to the Yahoo! style of organization. I think the problem with Yahoo! is that it simply got too big to be used as a directory. Niche directories are where it's at. (Also: Reddit wikis, which often are used similarly.)

teleclimber 8y ago
> Niche directories are where it's at. Agreed. And if we came up with a standard format for such lists you could make them searchable and we could end up with distributed searchable curated indexes that are not centrally controlled. And that is quite compelling compared to centralized fully algorithmic search systems run by mega-corps.

vagab0nd 8y ago

Adding to that, I sometimes fear that my Google search results are biased towards my own search history.

qnsi 8y ago

What's the point of saying "We have collected links for [...], relationships, [...]. When there are 0 links collected under relationships? Seems weird for me