Things actually sort of ran that way once. The DMOZ directory system was a cannonical, list of sites by subject listed top-down. It was maintained by a community of volunteers in the fashion of Wikipeda. I believe it was used as one reference for Google and other search engines at one time. I don't know if such an "objective" system could be rebuilt, however.

Still, it's good to remember that it was once uncertain whether people should access the web using something a table of content (portal/directory) or something like an index (search engine). It seems the search engines won.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ