Throw in some microformats2 and/or schema.org structured data and you're good to go.
Certain search engines specialize in this type of manually-curated content; I listed some in the "non-generalist search" section of my collection of indexing search engines: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
The problem we encountered is that the vast majority of people are not hyper-organized list makers — the 1% rule of the internet [2]. To create a "human curated search engine" with any utility, you need a massive amount of manually-categorized data — data which most people are simply not interested in generating. This is why no social bookmarking site (e.g. delicious, pinboard, etc.) has ever taken off to hundreds of millions of users.
I still think there's something exciting to be built here, but it will likely need to take a more "automated" approach as you suggested.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
So, for instance, the more weight you give to sites that are quoted by Wikipedia in your search rankings, the more content farms will have incentives to sneak edits that link to their sites.
There are ways to counter that (eg moderation), but in general, defense is more expensive than offense.
A large fraction of facebook content is MLMs and mobile game ads from one's own contacts.
Works suprisingly well already, sadly. So yes - at some point companies would pay people to vote for them.
But I still would prefer that system (with some differences) over the default. Because the people I would trust, would not fall for the common scams.
Whuffie is, roughly, money determined by your social interactions. More importantly, others also have a queryable score that's weighted according to who you esteem highly - this sounds like what you're proposing!
1) Single contributor website (blog, personal page...): It seems that we could spread the trust the whole website in the algorithm (at least more than for the next case)
2) Multi contributor website (forum, newspaper): It seems the trust should be given at an URL level
Something worth delving into if we are designing this trust based search engine in real-time here at HN ;)
https://blog.digraph.app/2020-06-13-democratization-of-searc...
In that post, I don't address the reputation management aspect as much, but it's central to making the whole thing work, and I think crowd-sourcing and a well-conceived reputation management system that can influence results are good next areas for exploration.
(At some points I feel it is thrown out as haphazardly as "correlation does not imply causation".)
But I think you might be onto something. It won't necessarily be easy but I think it deserves more than a quick dismissal.
> Then, separately, you can manually add people you know personally to your "network". You trust them, so anything they trust is also something you might be able to trust.
It doesn't matter how many sockpuppet accounts a marketing company creates if you don't click the "trust" button on any of them, and if the system is designed so that your local trust network only consists of what you trust directly and (weighted) transitively.
At that point, it doesn't need to be people you know personally; it just needs to be identities with a proven track record. If you can manage multiple identities, you could make ones e.g. for the explicit purpose of presenting a blacklist of bad sites you've found, or for providing a "front page" to a certain subject. Anyone is free to trust your identity or not, and choose exactly how to rank its actions.
This whole thing could be expanded to tagging and other metadata as well as comments, and so on.
A system of distributed trust like this is the makings of decentralized moderation. Decentralized curation. I've also had this idea on my mind for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21975294
Another "sticky" problem is how to make a living out of this I guess...
Classical search engines determine trust automatically, based on various factors including "link neighborhoods" where trustworthy sites link to other trustworthy sites. These automated strategies are clearly breaking down; the spammers are winning the arms-race.
So maybe we need to go back to human-based trust.
People used to curate lists of websites, which partly solved this problem but didn't necessarily scale. I wonder if that idea could be supercharged.
Consider a browser extension that people install, which:
a) gives users a button to mark a site as trusted/favorited
b) tracks domains visited (and frequency)
Then, separately, you can manually add people you know personally to your "network". You trust them, so anything they trust is also something you might be able to trust. Manual favorites could be weighted higher than frequently-visited sites, and both could be displayed inline next to links on all pages you visit. You could also see which people the trust in a given link comes from, in case some of them consistently have bad judgement about these things and you want to remove them from your list. Then, finally, you could create a personalized search-engine that only indexes the sites determined to be trusted by your personal network.
Of course this would require placing a great amount of trust in the extension and service themselves, so maybe they would have to be open-sourced or self-hostable or something (a profit motive might create a huge amount of temptation to abuse the data). That's a stickier problem.
Edit: There was a little ambiguity left here about transitive trust; “friends of friends” type stuff. I think if this went on for unlimited hops, we’d be back at square one. So maybe it only uses direct contacts, or maybe some small N of hops (where longer ones are weighted lower?). Maybe this would be configurable, not sure.
Also re: privacy, maybe you could come up with a clever way to E2E encrypt the site visit data, even though it’s shared with many parties?