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@degoogle I believe you should be speaking about Sapio so that many people contribute to its community driven database. Just saying (:

https://github.com/jonathanklee/Sapio

In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?

Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.

These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.

Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.

Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.

Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.

(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)

By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.

Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.

And for a time, it worked.

But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.

And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.

My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?

Do we really want to search every single website on the web?

Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?

Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?

At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?

And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?

@degoogle #tech #google #web #internet #LLM #LLMs #enshittification #technology #search #SearchEngines #SEO #SEM

@LineageOS @degoogle #degoogle I have two phones that I need to degoogle. A Samsung Note 5 and Huawei P30 pro. Lineage OS does not support either of them. Can someone recommend instructions on how I can achieve this. Basically degoogle, desamsung and dehuawei the two phones. I would prefer Lineage OS but since it is not officially supported for these phones, I will settle for getting it done in stock ROM as well.

In my journey to #degoogle myself, today after many years, I have deactivated my YouTube premium account. Was a challenge to setup LibreTube for the wife and kids and to bring over all their subscriptions, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. My biggest challenge right now is to find a solution with #tutanota to sync my Android contacts and calender so I can close down my Gmail account. @degoogle