Maybe we need a categorized, hand curated directory of sites that users can submit their own sites to for inclusion and categorization. Maybe like an open directory. Perhaps Mozilla could operate it, or maybe Yahoo!
We could also make a website where people can submit links to great websites they find, and also allow then to vote on the submissions of other users. That way you have a page filled with the best links, as determined by users. Maybe call it "the homepage of the internet".
You could even add the ability to discuss these links, and add a similar voting system to those discussions.
I would love to see a combo of a search engine and a portal. Basically at any step drilling down into links for categories and subcategories, I could type in a search bar and every site at that level and below would be searched.
I've been sort of considering going this path with my own search engine, but I feel whenever there is any sort of interactivity, there is the serious problem of spam and abuse; I'm not quite sure how to solve that.
Feels like accepting user content no longer flies on the web in 2022 due to the effectiveness of bot spam and lack of viable countermeasures :-/
I think non-crowdsourced manual curation (by you/your trusted volunteers) would be a feature. Sure, search would have more limited results, but really with how much cruft there is I don't see that as a bad thing. Start with the "known good/useful" domains and branch out from there.
Maybe. The upside of integrating it with a search engine is that you kinda can get dead link detection for free. Otherwise link rot is a real bitch to deal with for web directories maintained by few people.
Could probably back it off some human-readable format in a git repo or something, pull requests might help with moderation, and recruiting volunteers might be easier if the data is open and available/forkable for other projects.
