This was Yahoo in late 90s early 2000s. They had a human curated directory search where one could look up something like "kayaking" and find a bunch of sites on

This was Yahoo in late 90s early 2000s. They had a human curated directory search where one could look up something like "kayaking" and find a bunch of sites on kayaking. Then if you wanted to search on keyword it was outsourced to AltaVista and later Google. Altavista results were terrible and were almost nothing more than a keyword search (IE the word you were searching appeared on this page). Google got much better at the general search and this was history. I think the death of the directory search dramatically dropped the number of self-curated, informative sites from a domain expert that were common in the early internet. Now instead of making a website, many people are on content silos like Reddit/FB