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Re:Excite CEO: Why Excite didn't buy Google (2014) [audio] by simonh on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @07:48AM (#21647389)
With a pure search system, you can endlessly tweak your results to precisely what you need in any obscure topic space using search terms.

With a human curated directory, you will instead find that whatever terms you add, you always get dumped back into the same box of hand built pages of results. Once you’ve mined those out, this will get really frustrating.

Re:Excite CEO: Why Excite didn't buy Google (2014) [audio] by kevin_thibedeau on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @12:02PM (#21649613)
A blend of the two approaches would be useful. Expose the internal topic classifications and let searchers manipulate them to narrow or widen the search space.