Replying to Kicks Condor.
Thanks for replying. If the Web is our social network, then the question of finding stuff on the web looms large. Which is what led me to post about search engines and directories.
I like your observations about recency vs static in directories. To me the directory of the future needs to be a hybrid of directory and search engine: It needs to combine both recency and curated static PLUS a crawler. Reddit is a good starting point for recency if you have a spider crawling to pick up newly posted URLs plus the archives. Add in Curlie and Wikipedia to the crawl but use sub Reddits for taxonomy. That’s for general search engine.
Once upon a time: I used Fluid Dynamics Search Engine to create a sort of crawling Horror Fiction directory. It used the Meta tags and or user submitted data, plus it crawled the submitted page so it was indexing both meta data plus real on page text for search database. It worked quite well. I had always wished I had the resources to crawl deeper.
Anyway, I think you are on to something.
The goal is discovery, I think using many means, large and small is best.
