This question stems from wanting to have an "internet business directory" categorized by things like what they sell, and attributes about them (e.g.: buy from a specific country, stocks products of certain attributes, etc.)
But actually I would love to browse a comprehensive (maintained) directory that tags/categorizes all websites. It should leave out true spam/empty sites, but the rest can stay in. I assume some kind of attributes about popularity and size, too.
It could be organized with hierarchical categories somewhat like the Dewey Decimal system, or its open-license equivalent.
This sort of used to exist with DMOZ [0] and Yahoo Directory [1].
I actually think human curation would be a big part of this, by necessity. It is okay if it takes time and lots of effort, and is slightly laggy when new things pop up. People could submit change requests to be queued.
I am NOT looking for a search engine, LLM, or Wikipedia.
It DOES look like Curlie tried/tries this but is kind of inactive?
I AM looking for essentially a modern DMOZ or Yahoo Directory, but actually really good, up to date for today's websites.
It even seems potentially highly compatible with ads (not saying it should be commercial, but that seems the only way to sustain a project).
What say you? Does not exist? Or exists? Would you use this too? Is it time for such a project again (back to basics)?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Directory
[2] https://curlie.org
I can't help you with any suggestion for a better list. Most I've seen start out very promising and good intentions, and fail after a while, it's been 10 years or more since I've run across a half decent curated list project.
There have been IIRC a few good attempts over the years to create sizeable publicly accessible curated list with or without registration, and for a time looked like a success to be had, but given a couple years the momentum was mostly lost until the site stagnates, lingers and folds. Very small limited curated lists still exist in good numbers within forums mainly for the membership being committed to their shared and focused interests.
I'd guess the reason the momentum dies off and finally stagnates is whichever list stopped being important enough to maintain by the core of its users. While search engine difficulties are often blamed on the ever expanding web surface, proliferation of too many to count spam-worthy sites popping up, as well as the vast about of data that needs to be scraped and perhaps cached, more than anything there exists the issue of more and more web sites being non friendly to search bots and those who don't meet a prerequisite - the latter of non friendly being why the allure for curated lists eventually start to die off, whatever url listed isn't useful for everyone, resulting in the same unpleasant experience search engines can have -- for example the url being only accessible for those in the USA or some other location. The web has long forgot it's supposed to be WWW, not those who can afford the latest or live in the right area.
The web could be easier but so many sites don't even include a proper If no JavaScript then this replacement instance.