For example (just as rough proof of concept)
Research articles: Pretty much any academic library website for published stuff, arxiv.org for white papers in computer science and math, pubmed for biosciences
audio equipment: gearspace.com
Encyclopedia: Wikipedia
Thesaurus: Wordhippo.com
The idea is to avoid needing to visit a search engine. Might be a high idea.
FYI: that’s how Internet was indexed in the 90s.
For German-speakers, one such directory is lila.schike.de.
Für Leute, die Deutsch sprechen, gibt es u.a. das Verzeichnis lila.schike.de.
With the decline of search, web banners could come back in style!
We had that, it was called dmoz.org, looks dead/squatted now.
Curlie.org as I’ve been informed!
For a while DMOZ was the authoritative source for whether a website was real and relevant for a given subject. It was 100% human-curated (I administered a couple of topics for years) and was so trusted that putting a site into a category could get it to the first page of Google pretty much guaranteed. That power waned over time, but not because Google found something better, but because their motivations changed. Maybe it’s time for a dmoz comeback. Maybe something federated…
God I miss a well tended DMoz.
And then when Google copied it and sorted category links by PageRank? The good old days.
DMoz’s not well tended successor is Curlie.
@reallykindasorta I do this for onion and i2p sites in personal .md files
Accidentally reinventing Yahoo Directory.
Directory is exactly the word I should have used! Are there existing directories that already do this?
Remember webrings?
I like the sociable aspect of webrings, literally paying it forward and backward to two arbitrary websites on your own website. However, I don’t see how it helps searching for and finding a specific website as one would have to traverse the whole ring. A search engine incorporating the whole ring resolves this though.
As for OP’s specific question, synced bookmarks go a long way. I’ve also got quick terminal commands so I can immediately search on a website without having to open the browser and going to that website first.
A Secret Web by Benjamin Hollon [found on lobste.rs] is a great read; there I discovered nifty little search engines that specifically search the Small Web, such as Marginalia Search.
I’ll toss a few links into the hat…
https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/
Disclaimer: I’m a nerd. Hope you enjoy, and perhaps learn a thing or three.
