Comment by dredmorbius

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>