Comment by doublerabbit
21 days ago
Did anyone ever use directories? I remember the search engine. Yahoo had the same.
It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?
21 days ago
Did anyone ever use directories? I remember the search engine. Yahoo had the same.
It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?
Absolutely. Yahoo started out as directories, long before it added a search engine. They were a much better way to discover new corners of the internet (sorta like looking at a list of subreddits today). Web rings was another one. Internet was new, so it was always fun to surprise yourself with something different. Search engines were crap and would normally be used to look for something specific rather than discovery, which I guess hasn't changed.
Yahoo was originally "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", and earlier "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". A key position at the company was a librarian who help establish and slot links into that hierarchy, and some early press addressed this and the obvious future role of library science in online content management. Don't believe all forward-looking speculation you read. (Or backward-looking reminiscences, for that matter.)
DMOZ was another such classification, originally launched by Mozilla and run for a time by AOL, though it closed in 2017, discussed on HN at the time <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories>