With the decline of search, web banners could come back in style!
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Web rings are eternal!
Accidentally reinventing Yahoo Directory.
Directory is exactly the word I should have used! Are there existing directories that already do this?
This is what Yahoo was, in the 90s. Search didn't really exist yet. They made an honest effort to link, describe, and categorize every site on the internet, and for a while it seemed like they were on top of it.
That makes sense as a precursor to indexing! I might sign up to help with curlie.org as it seems to be exactly what I’m imagining. Thanks for pointing me.
For a while DMOZ was the authoritative source for whether a website was real and relevant for a given subject. It was 100% human-curated (I administered a couple of topics for years) and was so trusted that putting a site into a category could get it to the first page of Google pretty much guaranteed. That power waned over time, but not because Google found something better, but because their motivations changed. Maybe it’s time for a dmoz comeback. Maybe something federated…
God I miss a well tended DMoz.
And then when Google copied it and sorted category links by PageRank? The good old days.
DMoz’s not well tended successor is Curlie.
Remember webrings?
I like the sociable aspect of webrings, literally paying it forward and backward to two arbitrary websites on your own website. However, I don't see how it helps searching for and finding a specific website as one would have to traverse the whole ring. A search engine incorporating the whole ring resolves this though.
As for OP's specific question, synced bookmarks go a long way. I've also got quick terminal commands so I can immediately search on a website without having to open the browser and going to that website first.
A Secret Web by Benjamin Hollon [found on lobste.rs] is a great read; there I discovered nifty little search engines that specifically search the Small Web, such as Marginalia Search.
I'll toss a few links into the hat...
https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/
Disclaimer: I'm a nerd. Hope you enjoy, and perhaps learn a thing or three.
awesome-lists might be what you're looking for. If you're talking platforms, search ddg or alternativeto.net for "social bookmarking" I believe there's even some self hostable options that may have the functionality you want. Sorry for the "look it up" suggestion, I don't know your specific needs or remember exact names offhand.
Yes please. I will contribute.
I’ve signed up for an account on curlie.org which seems to be the main existing option. Looks like you can apply to be an editor of a particular collection. Looks like they need more people. I’m going to get my bearings then might sign up to contribute as an editor for some topics.
Not sure if this will help, but I recently started an independent site covering tech and gaming. It isn't monetized, no pop ups, no asking for your email for a newsletter. Zero modern annoyances, just a good old fashioned blog from longtime experts in the field.
I've called it Guilty Gamer, you can find it here.
We are covering things like gaming, retro gaming, e-readers, mechanical keyboards, and really anything else that strikes our fancy. Basically, the site was born out of the demise of the industry. As the mainstream is pumping out AI-written slop to please Google's bots, we are busy making content for humans by humans.
We are also ignoring the majority of SEO practices, which means it is a site built with direct navigation in mind, which is why I wanted to reply and share. It's heartening to see others also realizing bookmarks may be the wave of the future thanks to Google killing the open web.
Someone should build some kind of engine you can use to search for sites like that
hehe
I use https://fmhy.net/
Anything else can be found in lemmy or reddit in a search engine.
Sadly, it seems duckduckgo and startpage are getting more corrupt by whatever private equity that Bought them.
Shouldnt be too hard to make something like https://www.privacytools.io/ but for websites instead of applications.
Wanna study Japanese? Got you covered, buddy:
- Japanese Resource List by donkuri [Github]
- Learn Japanese in Spanish: jap4all's repository
- jap4all's videochannel in dalek.zone (peertube instance)
- Search kanji by radicals, components, SKIP code, etc
- Another Search kanji by radicals website
- Get definitions, example sentences, and much more info by typing a word in this engine
We had that, it was called dmoz.org, looks dead/squatted now.
Curlie.org as I’ve been informed!
For German-speakers, one such directory is lila.schike.de.
Für Leute, die Deutsch sprechen, gibt es u.a. das Verzeichnis lila.schike.de.