That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.
Comment on Ask HN: Can we create a new internet where search engines are irrelevant?
itsathursday@lemmy.world 5 months agoYahoo back in the day with its categories, and later Fazed.net with curated links was a nice time for a while
PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world 5 months ago
erwan@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
It worked because the web was much smaller.
TrumpetX@programming.dev 5 months ago
Pay to play was the problem there. I had the highest ranking joke page on webcrawler for a stint, but Yahoo wanted $500 to put me on top. My 15 year old self was not interested.