¿Por qué no los dos?

1) The idea is that a more organized structure is easier for a librarian to index. Today, libraries still have librarians. The book pile just wouldn't take decades to build familiarity.

2) Times change. New technology exists, people use the internet differently, and there's more at stake. Just because an approach didn't work before doesn't mean that it won't work now.

There are real problems with an organizational approach, but I don't see why the idea isn't worth a revisit.

I think these efforts get bogged down in the huge amount of content out there, the impermanence of that content and also the difficulty in placing sites into ontologies.

And at the end of the day, there's not a large enough value proposition to balance the immense effort.

I think, if you were to do it today, you would want to work on / with the internet archive, so at least things that were categorized wouldn't change or disappear (as much)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

What would make the approach viable is if there were a nice way to automate and crowd source most/all of the effort. Maybe that means changing the idea of what makes a website. Maybe there could just be little grass roots reddit-esque communities that are indexed/verified (google already favors reddit/hn links). Who knows, but it's an interesting problem to kick around.

But to me, crowdsourcing is also what Jerry & David did. The users submitted links to Yahoo. AltaVista also had a form for users to submit new links.

Also, Wikipedia's list of links are also crowdsourced in the sense that many outside websurfers (not just staff editors) make suggested edits to the wiki pages. Looking at a "revision history" of a particular wiki page makes the crowdsourced edits more visible: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_web_direc...

I wasn't being dismissive. I was trying to refine your crowdsourcing idea by explicitly surfacing what's been tried in the past.

The thread's op asks: "Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?"

If the current best answer for op is: "I propose crowdsourced curated directories is the alternative to Google/Bing -- but the implementation details is left as an exercise for the reader" ... that's fine that our conversation terminates there and we don't have to go around in circles. The point is I didn't know this thread's discussion ultimately terminates there until I ask more probing questions so people can try to expand on what their alternative proposal actually entails. I also don't know what baseline knowledge the person proposing the idea has. I.e. does person suggesting an idea have knowledge of internet's evolution and has that been taken into account?

Verified by who, exactly?

I know, I know... "dismissive comment", but it's an important thing to think about: Who decides what goes in the library? It's an evergreen topic, even in real, physical libraries, as those tedious lists of "Banned And Challenged Books" attest. It seems every time a copy of Huckleberry Finn gets pulled from an elementary school library in Altoona everyone gets all upset, so can you imagine what would happen if the radfems got their hands on a big Web Directory and cleansed it of all positive mentions of trans people?

It wouldn't be about policing, just organizing.

The underlying goal: "Get a user the information they want when they don't know where it lives" isn't really going to be helped by a non-searchable directory of millions of sites.