i'm tired of how hard it is to find things online. google has completely gone to shite with its ai slop integration, and regular search engines as a whole are somewhat ruined by SEO putting commercial sites above things useful to humans. large parts of the internet–uncrawled pages, chatrooms, p2p files–aren't possible to find in them. search features on individual sites and chats still work but the problem is finding these places to begin with.
so i want to have a new kind of net directory, more human curated, and with more things covered. that is a very old idea, and it did exist before modern search engines overtook it, but i think a modern version of it could work. maybe something more like a wiki, with pages for and about anything on the human net, organised with tags or categories (of course it should have a search function too). i want the internet to really be an extremely interconnected global "information superhighway"
does anything like this exist already?
wiby.me is kind of like this already since all the sites are human vetted but i wish this kind of stuff existed more broadly...
these two sites have partially filled that void for me
https://marginalia-search.com/explore
https://susam.net/wander/
marginalia search especially is fantastic. although that hole in my heart can't really be fully filled, the entirety of the internet being that way was what made it so special for me as a child, but we'll forever be relegated to relative obscurity now.
i use kagi for search. its a paid search engine. i find its marginally better than any free one. not sold on those small web search engines but it's a nice idea
collaborative directories
human-curated & organized by topic
https://www.webjamboree.net/ - 10k+ sites (open submissions, searchable)
https://url.town/ - 800+ sites (submissions limited to a specific community, searchable)
https://ooh.directory/ - 2k+ blogs (open submissions, searchable)
https://neato.directory/ - new & pretty barren (open submissions)
tiny search engines
smaller engines don't have the resources to crawl as much of the net as google, so they stuggle as direct competitors. i think they're at their best when they embrace their limited scope and focus on serving really specific communities or needs
https://lieu.cblgh.org/about - searches sites that are members of a particular webring
https://fee.cool/code/mold-net/ - searches sites from lists of bookmarks
https://neocities.org/search - searches sites hosted on neocities.org
directories by individuals
these are my favorite. can be hit or miss, but finding one curated by someone with similar tastes & interests hits so hard
https://bukmark.club/ - directory of personal sites with link directory pages
https://waywardweb.org/ - same as above but linked together by a webring
>>3mrfxrij6n323
i think you should absolutely make your net directory! it's worth it to start with whatever you have. you can make a webpage that's just a list of all the links in your browser bookmarks, put it online, and go from there. make it more complicated later, if you want. for a personal wiki-style site, look into https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ or for a multi-user wiki, look into https://www.dokuwiki.org/
i read https://thoughts.melonking.net/thoughts/every-site-needs-a-links-page-why-linking-matters back when it was published, and following that advice changed my relationship to the internet for the better. it's easier to ignore all the bullshit when i have a nice collection of stuff i actually like to look at online. the net feels more connected when you make yourself a part of that network
>>3mriafz57h42t
i have my own directory https:/toxxy.neocities.org/directory i think it's important for each site to link to lots of other sites to keep the web interconnected
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