Miss Web Directories

In my previous post, I alluded to how I miss the directories of the 90s / very early 00s. Pre-Google, search engines were not great. Query recommendation accuracy seemed more due to the topic in question being niche enough that it would be hard to mess up. Broader topics could be quite a bit more difficult to find what one was looking for. By comparison, directories were great. It took a little bit more time drilling down to specific topics, but once I got to the sub-directory that I wanted, I’d be greeted with a variety of links to exactly what I was looking for. It was also a nice way to go wandering the Web, following links as my curiosity desired, kinda like setting one’s self adrift on Wikipedia or TV Tropes.

Generally, I tend to categorize search engines as “fine when I’m in a hurry”. They’ll barf up a page worth of results and I should be able to find a link or two with the basic information I need to understand the gist of what I’m looking up. However, when I have time and really want to go deep on a subject, I find the overall quality of the results underwhelming. Usually there will be a link to Wikipedia somewhere at the top, then a slew of Quora pages, a Reddit link or two, maybe some YouTube videos, with everything rounded out by pages where the creators clearly cared more about search engine optimization than the actual quality of their articles. This has been a common theme when I look stuff up. It’s disappointing and, more importantly, at least to me, boring.

The nice thing about directories, well the good ones anyway, is that they allow people to cut through the fat. In a self-respecting directory, those Quora pages, overly SEO’d articles, and the like would either be rejected on the spot. They’re the sort of thing that only really featured in crappy pay for inclusion directories, which didn’t take long to look like shit.

I used to really enjoy going to places like the Open Directory Project, start from the home page, then maybe I’d want to read about some anime. Then I’d drill down to a general fan site, or I’d find something super specific that focused on Revolutionary Girl Utena, Patlabor, or whatever. Maybe I’d be in the mood for video games. Then I’d look up Parasite Eve pages or something. I might actually want to learn something, so I’d drill down to space shuttle pages, or volcanoes, or dinosaurs. Places like OPD were great for hopping from one link to another in search of interesting stuff, and in their heyday they could be trusted to have pretty darn good links.

Certainly, one could say that I’m probably romanticizing to an extent. Rose coloured glasses are powerful things after all. I’m sure I am, but I also wonder if a directory could potential work better these days compared to when they first came about. One of the big things that they suffered from was a lack of funding. Companies weren’t keen to put advertising on them because users were so transient, hopping through links, getting to the sites that interested them, ignoring any ads that might appear on individual sections of the directory. Paid for inclusion directories became a money-making alternative, but most of these were terrible, as the quality of the links became increasingly awful. About the only one that was halfway okay was Yahoo’s but that was likely due to them charging quite a lot of money for a link to be added, filtering out a lot of fly by nights. It was very hard to make enough money to pay the bills for directories, which was a big contributing factor to their deaths.

That being said, I do wonder if it would be more viable to make a directory in this day and age. It would need to be 100% human edited, and not charge for inclusion. People could submit links, and it would be up to those running the place to decide if what was on the other side was a good fit or not. Of course, it would have to be crowd funded. Nowadays, people are way more open to this sort of thing, as opposed to the 1990s when it would be dismissed out of hand as “eBegging”. Could a well-crafted, well-rounded directory do reasonably well for itself these days? Are the variety of topics too varied for it to even be manageable? Maybe theme-specific ones would need to emerge first, like video game-specific directories, or anime-specific, or space news-specific, or whatever.

I would absolutely love to see directories come back be they on the Web or in Gemini space. They fill an innate need I have to be in an environment where my curiosity and intellectual wanderlust can be fed in a variety of ways. The only thing that I’m not sure of is how much of an appetite other people have for such things. If you have any thoughts on directories, feel free to email me at the address below.

*I’m well aware that this post potentially contradicts some of my “Using the Web with Purpose” post, but I’d slap directory exploration into my one hour of stupid bullshit on the internet that I like to allot myself in the evening.

- Pennywhether

March 27, 2021

pennywhether@posteo.net