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I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of G

I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are SEO spam.

jeffbee 1y ago
Do you think it might be possible that today's web is many orders of magnitude larger than the Yahoo directory?
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Yes, and it is mostly trash.
  - signatoremo 1y ago
    The good part of the Internet today is way bigger than the entire Internet of 1999.
    - marginalia_nu 1y ago
      I think size is a smaller problem than link rot. That is and has always been the slow killer of any web directory.
- ofalkaed 1y ago
  Size of the web does not matter, it is more about not obsessing about cataloging the entire web and focusing on the content offered through the portal. I think the biggest issue to overcome with doing such a thing in 2025 is the death of links pages and webrings, they allowed the portal to give you access to web beyond the sites listed on the portal. But the blog killed the homepage and with it went their links page and the webrings they were members of. The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated web as well through those links pages and webrings.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
wildpeaks 1y ago
I still credit dmoz (one of the main data sources back in the days of pre-google portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) for giving me good habits for data classification And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use social media because I mostly only follow people who curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of human curators having ownership of their own categories
signatoremo 1y ago
Yahoo? Is that a joke? Google won because Yahoo and the others were inferior. Not everyone here is a kid who didn’t know better about Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista, or AOL.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  Not because they were inferior, but just because they were faster.

I used to use Yahoo, which was fairly portal-like with its categories and manually submitted websites. And I got to say, it was far higher quality than 99% of Google search results that are SEO spam.

jeffbee 1y ago

Do you think it might be possible that today's web is many orders of magnitude larger than the Yahoo directory?

vouaobrasil 1y ago
Yes, and it is mostly trash.
- signatoremo 1y ago
  The good part of the Internet today is way bigger than the entire Internet of 1999.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    I think size is a smaller problem than link rot. That is and has always been the slow killer of any web directory.
ofalkaed 1y ago
Size of the web does not matter, it is more about not obsessing about cataloging the entire web and focusing on the content offered through the portal. I think the biggest issue to overcome with doing such a thing in 2025 is the death of links pages and webrings, they allowed the portal to give you access to web beyond the sites listed on the portal. But the blog killed the homepage and with it went their links page and the webrings they were members of. The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated web as well through those links pages and webrings.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

wildpeaks 1y ago

I still credit dmoz (one of the main data sources back in the days of pre-google portals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ) for giving me good habits for data classification And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use social media because I mostly only follow people who curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of human curators having ownership of their own categories

signatoremo 1y ago

Yahoo? Is that a joke? Google won because Yahoo and the others were inferior. Not everyone here is a kid who didn’t know better about Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista, or AOL.

vouaobrasil 1y ago
Not because they were inferior, but just because they were faster.