Andy BaioWaiting for someone to make an artisanal search engine that only indexes manually verified websites written by humans. Farm-to-table organic search results, handmade with 100% certified human creativity, like your grandparents told you about.
Courtney (moved to dads.cool)@andybaio Andy don’t tempt me
Anil Dash
ʎllnɔs
Darius Kazemi@andybaio I mean. Frankly I have begun using this as a non-joke search engine
Stu@darius
this is cool, thanks for sharing
this is cool, thanks for sharing
how now@darius it's like a search engine for the late-90s web, thank you for this
@andybaio Also of note, the search engine is open source and comes with a guide for if you would like to build your *own* searchable curated list of actually-good sites.
https://wiby.me/about/guide.html
> The search engine is not meant to index the entire web and then sort it with a ranking algorithm. It prefers to seed its index through human submissions made by guests, or by the guardian(s) of the search engine.
Qristy
Mark Gardner@andybaio Wasn’t that #Yahoo at first? Sites were added and organized by hand IIRC, and the name stood for Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle
matt comroe@mjgardner @andybaio It was!!! You could check back in on your favorite categories every day to see if anything new was added. Totally wild to think about now.
Dave Mackey@mjgardner @andybaio It was (though I'm not sure being written by a human was a condition...but little was written by machines at that point). Unfortunately, the rapid growth of the web made scaling difficult. I think this can be fixed by a hybrid that uses automated crawling/indexing augmented by human curation.
Clifford Adams@mjgardner @andybaio
Yahoo is for young whippersnappers! Bring back the NCSA What's New page:
@wikicliff @andybaio I remember that as well
valkraider 
@wikicliff @mjgardner @andybaio
Haha, awesome. There is a 1994 entry in there of something we did at my teeny little college. Sweet!
Shmarkus
Paul Carroll@andybaio I wonder if something like Kagi (https://kagi.com/) will lean toward that eventually 😄
Commodore Sixty Bore@andybaio Us humans can be terrible at curation because we create biased systems. However, I love this idea and I wonder if #librarians would be excellent hosts of such a search engine. Often librarians are helping others with their research and could therefore capture a more diverse source list for such a search engine.
@sikkdays @andybaio Definitely need some counter-balances to human bias. imho, best handled by ensuring diverse participation in curation.
Librarians would be logical contributors but I think the net can be cast much wider - specifically, anyone with expertise in an area and/or interest in being recognized as an expert in an area.
For example - teachers, auto mechanics, medical professionals, and those tweens writing high quality content on wikipedia. ;-)
Avi Rappoport (avirr)
Fluz@avirr @sikkdays @andybaio my mother was getting her masters back then and was exposed to their efforts. They had their own xml schema and we’re pretty hung ho about the effort. Many people such as myself were introduced to computers at the public library, it seemed like a natural fit. But it was also right around then that a lot of budgets started to get slashed.
Tröglödÿt
emmatonkin@sikkdays @andybaio
This was a thing, back when.
RDN, which became Intute: "provided access to online resources, via a large database of resources [...] reviewed by an academic specialist in the subject, who wrote a short review of between 100 and 200 words, and described via various metadata fields (such as subject discipline(s) it would be useful to) resource type, creator, intended audience, what time-period or geographical area the resource covered, and so on."
@sikkdays @andybaio
Anyway, it sunk without trace, iirc because of a combo of poor expectation management, impracticality (way too much of the data authoring process was manual...!) and cost among other factors.
I think the closest thing to it now is ResearchGate, which farms manual input out to participants who benefit directly from inclusion and therefore do not need to be paid to contribute reviews (but which doesn't offer much metadata by comparison and is limited in scope).
@andybaio okay, not quite, but how about human augmented w/built-in systems to mitigate bot (or human) ranking manipulation? Proposal (more to come) here: https://github.com/davidshq/next-search
Michael Roufa
Gavin Anderegg@andybaio It was tougher to find things in the mid-90s, but I loved Yahoo!'s web portal back in the day. It was fun to explore and find weird corners of the early web. I was reminded of that when I first saw https://ooh.directory (a recently started portal for blogs).
Paolo Amoroso@andybaio They should call it something like Yahoo!
Silsby (he/him)@andybaio Time to bring back The Whole Internet Catalogue: https://archive.org/details/wholeinternet00krolmiss
Dave Guarino@andybaio Just call me with your keywords and I’ll get back to you in about a week.
nk@andybaio how is search on Waxy?
The Doctor@andybaio This may be of interest, then:
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2019-02-04/sometimes-the-old-ways-may-be-best/
Josh "cortex" Millard@andybaio give it a snappy name like Huzzah?!
Dan Lyke@andybaio isn't that https://search.marginalia.nu/ ?
Marginalia Search
search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
jibbi/ジッビ
Phil Gyford@andybaio Yahoo, this excites me and would look smart! Some kind of hot bot as a webcrawler, or metacrawler, generating a dogpile of all the web. To do an infoseek I would ask Jeeves to go and provide an altavista of results.
Peter Merholz
metasilk@philgyford *chuckles * well done. (also : wow, I have a visual memory of most if not all of those— did not know i had that.)
T. Austin Brown@andybaio We've reinvented Yahoo! Categories?
David Friedman@andybaio I remember being a photo student in college and submitting my photography website to Yahoo!, probably around 1995. When they added me to the list, I was one of maybe a hundred photographers on there. Felt like the future!
@andybaio Wow, there I am in a 1996 capture on the wayback machine, the earliest snapshot they have. One of 737 photographers by then!
Daniel Barlow@andybaio I’m thinking it’s comeback time for the directories and link farms we used to have pre-Altavista. We could spider the directories and then just … stop … when we got more than two or three links deep.
Devine Lu Linvega
Ian Ramjohn@andybaio I want hand-coded html, none of this css crap you get in modern webpages. If you have too many pages to code by hand, maybe you have too many pages!
Sasha
Jeff Martin
John Jones
jsled@andybaio I'm surprised (j/k I'm not) that we don't have more community-focused topical search engines in this same vein non-ironically. Google's dominance killed a ton of innovation, here.
Delajor🍞@andybaio verified by an AI?
leblancfg@andybaio lol remember Jason Calacanis' Mahalo from like, 2008?
@leblancfg @andybaio I remember Mahalo, if I recall correctly it was kind of wiki'ish, hosting a lot of content on the site rather than linking out.
@davidshq @andybaio indeed. I remember watching Jason's livestreams back then, and even my naïve mindset at the time (still a teen) thinking it would never make it. Having humans tag and write stuff was the wrong way to go and could never compete with the likes of Google, whose results were already quite excellent.
Times have changed though!
Kevin@andybaio Now I pretty much just ask people I know when I have a question like "how do I ..." or "what kind of X should I get." Once you know enough people, *someone* will have expertise in any given area. Or, the wisdom of crowds blah blah
@KevinLikesMaps @andybaio Apparently (I read it somewhere) younger folks are using #TikTok a lot for this sort of crowd sourcing...unfortunately it is often wrong.