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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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762362> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759032>. These were both useful and limited. Useful because early Web content-based search sucked. Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection, and only launched in late 1995. Google came along in (late?) 1997 and blew everyone away, I was using it by 1999. There were "sponsored content" directories, but those tended not to gain much traction as they were so obviously inferior in quality. The main directories generally avoided this taint. The Web was far smaller, far less commercial, much less dynamic (editable / user-contributable sites were extremely rare, blogs barely existed), and pretty eclectic. Organising by category pretty much worked, as content evolved slowly, the total space was relatively small, and highlighting the Really Good Stuff was both useful and tractable. Today that's fairly intractable, though directory-like organisation might be seen in, say Wikipedia or some similar projects. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ> There are still several online directories, some general, many specialised: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories> |