News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking. Parent comment

Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by dragonwriter on Thursday August 10, 2023 @03:34AM (#37073122)
> Before someone suggests a new search engine where the ranking algorithm is replaced with AI, I would like to propose a return to human-curated directories. Yahoo had one, and for a while, so did Google. It was pre-social-media and pre-wiki, so none of these directories were optimized to take advantage of crowdsourcing.

False. Google Directory (and many other major name, mostly now defunct, web directories) were powered by data from DMOZ which was crowdsourced (and kind of still is, through Curlie [0] and while some parts of the website show updated as recently as today, enough fairly core links are dead or without content that its pretty obviously not a thriving operation.) Also, it was not pre-Wiki: WikiWikiWeb was created in 1995, DMOZ in 1998. It was pre-Wikipedia, but Wikipedia wasn’t the first Wiki.

[0] https://curlie.org/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by hliyan on Thursday August 10, 2023 @05:16AM (#37073798)
Interestingly, a static snapshot of DMOZ is still out there: https://dmoztools.net/ | https://web.archive.org/web/20180126194656/http://dmoztools....
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by dragonwriter on Thursday August 10, 2023 @11:25AM (#37077377)
Actually, several static snapshops exist (a benefit of open licensing) despite the fact attempts to fork and continue have been not so successful. In addition to the one upthread there are also:

https://dmoz-odp.org/

http://www.odp.org/homepage.php

[ Parent | on HN ]