I'd like to see a search engine where a trusted/verified set of users are allowed to categorize websites and the categories thus derived can be used by everyone to help filter their searches.

So when a categorizing user does a search and clicks on a result that takes them to best-auto-parts.co.uk, they click "Shopping" on their categorization toolbar. After one or two matching categorizations, that site gets excluded from searches which have "shopping sites" turned off.

You could also turn the categorizing thing around and decide that you only want to search within web forums (phpBB systems and similar), where you'll often find people posting rather esoteric knowledge about whatever esoteric car you're searching for.

You are describing Yahoo, ca. 1995. The problem is that new users have no idea how to navigate the categorization system. (Remember using the dewey decimal system? It had the same problem, except that your local librarian was there to help.)

Yeah, I remember the old categorization thing. I'm thinking of a much more high-level categorization: Here's sites selling shit. Here's web forums. Social media. Blogs. Commercial sites.

Honestly what I'd really like is a toggle that I can flip over to say "only show me sites that aren't trying to sell me shit", and then maybe I can read an honest review about the tent I'm interested in without 50 bullshit blog entries that just copy-pasted the manufacturer's copy and added an Amazon affiliate link.

DMOZ[0] was that catalog, more or less, and was used as you describe, more or less. It finally died last year, although I think it was quite dormant for the last 10 or so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

Basically you want Yahoo but with a Wikipedia-like hierarchical tagging. You need a reputation system though so the editing isn’t just seo’d getting us to the same situation we’re currently in.

If Facebook had an api, you could filter based on the tags just provided by your contacts or something like that.