Before decent search engines, Yahoo and others such as Netscape built large directories of sites. Netscape's was called DMOZ (Directory from Mozilla?) and was probably part of AOL's acquisition of Netscape during its demise
Sort of an open-sourced alternative to the original Yahoo concept -- back when that was Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, essentially a set of nested links directing you through the Internet, circa 1995 - 1997.
After Yahoo (mostly) retired that in exchange for Search, Netscape created a crowdsourced version. AOL acquired that when they bought out Netscape.
No, it was pretty much exactly the Yahoo directory, only they allowed the public to add sites...sort of. Someone would claim the editorship of some area and it was up to that person to decide what was allowed. There was no clear process, last I knew, to kick an editor out if he/she weren't doing their job and some editors seemed to have a very particular slant in certain categories, sometimes commercially or otherwise competitively motivated. (I don't want competitor websites added to this category I control). It stagnated.
It used to be significant enough that it was always on the list of things to do when you wanted to get traffic or reputation for your website. I rarely if ever actually used it to find anything, but I definitely listed my companies and services on it.
