4 ms·

>I welcome any attempts to build a more organized internet. I don't think the communal book pile approach is scaling very well. Let me know if I misunderstand

by jasode 7y ago

>I welcome any attempts to build a more organized internet. I don't think the communal book pile approach is scaling very well. Let me know if I misunderstand your comment but to me, this has already been tried. Yahoo's founders originally tried to "organize" the internet like a good librarian. Yahoo in 1994 was originally called, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web"[0] with hierarchical directories to curated links. However, Jerry & David noticed that Google's search results were more useful to web surfers and Yahoo was losing traffic. Therefore, in 2000 they licensed Google's search engine. Google's approach was more scaleable than Yahoo's. I often see several suggestions that the alternative to Google is curated directories but I can't tell if people are unaware of the early internet's history and don't know that such an idea was already tried and how it ultimately failed. [0] http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/57977a3188e4a714088bac98/jerry-yang-and-david-filo-created-yahoo-back-in-january-1994-while-studying-at-stanford-university-they-renamed-it-yahoo-in-march.jpg http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/57977a3188e4a714088...

organsnyder 7y ago
I remember trying to get one of my company's sites listed on Yahoo! back in the late 1990s. Despite us being an established company (founded in 1985) with a good domain name (cardgames.com) and a bunch of good, free content (rules for various card games, links to various places to play those games online, etc.), it took months.
- Stronico 7y ago
  That was my experience as well. For old companies and new. Yahoo was just really slow.
- dsparkman 7y ago
  That was not a bad thing. It was curated. Most of the crap never made it in the directory precisely because humans made decisions about what got in. If you wanted in the directory faster, you could pay a fee to get to the front of the queue. The result is that Yahoo could hire people to process the queue and make money without ads.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    Isn't paying money to jump to the front of the queue just another form of advertising?
davemp 7y ago
> I often see several suggestions that the alternative to Google is curated directories but I can't tell if people are unaware of the early internet's history and don't know that such an idea was already tried and how it ultimately failed. ¿Por qué no los dos? 1) The idea is that a more organized structure is easier for a librarian to index. Today, libraries still have librarians. The book pile just wouldn't take decades to build familiarity. 2) Times change. New technology exists, people use the internet differently, and there's more at stake. Just because an approach didn't work before doesn't mean that it won't work now. There are real problems with an organizational approach, but I don't see why the idea isn't worth a revisit.
- toast0 7y ago
  There are plenty of these, wikipedia has a list [1]. I think these efforts get bogged down in the huge amount of content out there, the impermanence of that content and also the difficulty in placing sites into ontologies. And at the end of the day, there's not a large enough value proposition to balance the immense effort. I think, if you were to do it today, you would want to work on / with the internet archive, so at least things that were categorized wouldn't change or disappear (as much) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
  - davemp 7y ago
    Obviously a naïve web directory isn't going to cut it. What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. Maybe that means changing the idea of what makes a website. Maybe there could just be little grass roots reddit-esque communities that are indexed/verified (google already favors reddit/hn links). Who knows, but it's an interesting problem to kick around.
    - jasode 7y ago
      >What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. But to me, crowdsourcing is also what Jerry & David did. The users submitted links to Yahoo. AltaVista also had a form for users to submit new links. Also, Wikipedia's list of links are also crowdsourced in the sense that many outside websurfers (not just staff editors) make suggested edits to the wiki pages. Looking at a "revision history" of a particular wiki page makes the crowdsourced edits more visible: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_directories&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_direc...
ehnto 7y ago
Consider the sheer size of the internet now. Even if you could categorize and file that many websites accurately, how do you display that to the user in a way that's usable? It will probably look a lot like a search engine, no matter which way you frame it. The underlying goal: "Get a user the information they want when they don't know where it lives" isn't really going to be helped by a non-searchable directory of millions of sites.

by jasode 7y ago

organsnyder 7y ago

I remember trying to get one of my company's sites listed on Yahoo! back in the late 1990s. Despite us being an established company (founded in 1985) with a good domain name (cardgames.com) and a bunch of good, free content (rules for various card games, links to various places to play those games online, etc.), it took months.

Stronico 7y ago
That was my experience as well. For old companies and new. Yahoo was just really slow.
dsparkman 7y ago
That was not a bad thing. It was curated. Most of the crap never made it in the directory precisely because humans made decisions about what got in. If you wanted in the directory faster, you could pay a fee to get to the front of the queue. The result is that Yahoo could hire people to process the queue and make money without ads.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  Isn't paying money to jump to the front of the queue just another form of advertising?

davemp 7y ago

> I often see several suggestions that the alternative to Google is curated directories but I can't tell if people are unaware of the early internet's history and don't know that such an idea was already tried and how it ultimately failed. ¿Por qué no los dos? 1) The idea is that a more organized structure is easier for a librarian to index. Today, libraries still have librarians. The book pile just wouldn't take decades to build familiarity. 2) Times change. New technology exists, people use the internet differently, and there's more at stake. Just because an approach didn't work before doesn't mean that it won't work now. There are real problems with an organizational approach, but I don't see why the idea isn't worth a revisit.

toast0 7y ago
There are plenty of these, wikipedia has a list [1]. I think these efforts get bogged down in the huge amount of content out there, the impermanence of that content and also the difficulty in placing sites into ontologies. And at the end of the day, there's not a large enough value proposition to balance the immense effort. I think, if you were to do it today, you would want to work on / with the internet archive, so at least things that were categorized wouldn't change or disappear (as much) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
- davemp 7y ago
  Obviously a naïve web directory isn't going to cut it. What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. Maybe that means changing the idea of what makes a website. Maybe there could just be little grass roots reddit-esque communities that are indexed/verified (google already favors reddit/hn links). Who knows, but it's an interesting problem to kick around.
  - jasode 7y ago
    >What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. But to me, crowdsourcing is also what Jerry & David did. The users submitted links to Yahoo. AltaVista also had a form for users to submit new links. Also, Wikipedia's list of links are also crowdsourced in the sense that many outside websurfers (not just staff editors) make suggested edits to the wiki pages. Looking at a "revision history" of a particular wiki page makes the crowdsourced edits more visible: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_directories&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_direc...

ehnto 7y ago

Consider the sheer size of the internet now. Even if you could categorize and file that many websites accurately, how do you display that to the user in a way that's usable? It will probably look a lot like a search engine, no matter which way you frame it. The underlying goal: "Get a user the information they want when they don't know where it lives" isn't really going to be helped by a non-searchable directory of millions of sites.