Sadly, this was LookSmart back in 1998. It was an in-house edited directory, but I told the CEO we should build a pagerank that diffuses to unlisted sites as w

Sadly, this was LookSmart back in 1998. It was an in-house edited directory, but I told the CEO we should build a pagerank that diffuses to unlisted sites as well. A pretty good web directory at the time was cheap, about $12 million a year for editors, but Google had 10+ years where it did better with unsupervised algorithms, so nobody spent any time on integrating human curators.