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On the surface this is a good idea, however this would turn wildly anticompetitive. Whether or not your site would have business on the web would be entirely di

On the surface this is a good idea, however this would turn wildly anticompetitive. Whether or not your site would have business on the web would be entirely dictated by whether or not you woul be correctly classified (or indeed classified at all) in this engine. if you wanted to start your own stackoverflow competitor for whatever reason, you would have a very hard time getting any traction. this is also true of current general purpose engines, but you still do stand a chance to be referenced well and hit high enough to still get traffic. the yahoo model collapsed for this very reason. back when you went to more than 5 websites to look at screenshots of the other 4, the directories would not necessarly show you the latest thing, because it wasn't on the list of sites manually added to each directory. i think the current problem with google isn't to do with spam. i think google has become complacent because their ads are on all the sites anyway, so the function of "maximize revenue per search" doesn't actually care if you find what you're looking for, because you will get shown google ads anyway, and will be coming back to google anyway. in fact, they probably get to show more ads by feeding you bad results, because then you're loading more pages. this didn't used to be the case when google search was on top of spam sites, but it doesn't feel like they're doing anymore algo updates to curb the current trend, and spam sites have caught on to what ranks higher in the results.

xp84 3y ago
> if you wanted to start your own stackoverflow competitor for whatever reason, you would have a very hard time getting any traction. this is also true of current general purpose engines, but you still do stand a chance to be referenced well and hit high enough to still get traffic Hmm... You started to backpedal but then persisted. In the today world, your SO competitor would have that (slim) chance to rank if you started getting links from sites like HN or from people on Twitter who matter and know about tech. This would give you some PageRank and then you'd start possibly ranking in Google (in theory. In reality, no you probably wouldn't rank for anything since you're competing with 1,000,000 spam sites including whole verbatim clones of every page on SO that Google can't even get under control) If any directory would be worth using, it would be run by humans who would HAVE to look at each submission. They could also look at who's linking to it, and evaluate "Is this a backlink from like, a gibberish page on `prawns-01-blork.info` or from like, Joel Spolsky's Twitter account?" Yes, it would take a lot of work, but like, it would be creating a truly useful product that people might pay for. And we have examples of other professions where "just rubber stamp everyone who pays" is frowned upon, like building inspectors and journalists. It's a hard problem, but it's far from hopeless.

xp84 3y ago

> if you wanted to start your own stackoverflow competitor for whatever reason, you would have a very hard time getting any traction. this is also true of current general purpose engines, but you still do stand a chance to be referenced well and hit high enough to still get traffic Hmm... You started to backpedal but then persisted. In the today world, your SO competitor would have that (slim) chance to rank if you started getting links from sites like HN or from people on Twitter who matter and know about tech. This would give you some PageRank and then you'd start possibly ranking in Google (in theory. In reality, no you probably wouldn't rank for anything since you're competing with 1,000,000 spam sites including whole verbatim clones of every page on SO that Google can't even get under control) If any directory would be worth using, it would be run by humans who would HAVE to look at each submission. They could also look at who's linking to it, and evaluate "Is this a backlink from like, a gibberish page on `prawns-01-blork.info` or from like, Joel Spolsky's Twitter account?" Yes, it would take a lot of work, but like, it would be creating a truly useful product that people might pay for. And we have examples of other professions where "just rubber stamp everyone who pays" is frowned upon, like building inspectors and journalists. It's a hard problem, but it's far from hopeless.