Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/.

List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories

Uh, yeah. Jerry Yang when he was a VLSI student at Stanford, and I was a lowly semiconductor designer at Motorola Japan used to talk about these things, so ... yeah: I was being sardonic.

EDIT: He used to say to me: "[WhateverMyNameIs]! Nobody is going to pay a penny per newspaper article or a nickel for a song!". And I'd say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to pay to advertise on your personal curated bookmark list!". Turns out that one of us was right. And it wasn't me.

Looks like VLIB is rotting though - the first link I clicked (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) seems to belong to a domain squatter now.

More like the now defunct DMOZ, I'd say.

> More like the now defunct DMOZ

DMOZ was a good idea, but the execution was biased because curated lists invite partiality. You might build something better only if you could mitigate this natural tendency.