Futurology

Yahoo started out like this. They had humans curating the sites that they searched, and it was pretty good until the web got too big for that to be efficient.

I haven’t used kagi, but I believe you can do exactly that with it. You do have to pay for the service, but that’s probably a good thing.

This is a link to the features page. It allows you to permanently ban or boost results from specific domains. But you may need to do some manual effort to make that happen, I don’t really know if there are community-curated backbones or anything for that.

But you can also see if the result is popular, and they seem to work pretty hard to make their platform worth the spend. Everything I’ve heard from people who use it is good.

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features

I've got exactly that running on my home network for tech stuff.

I've thought of opening it up and even been thinking of building a group of people trustworthy to do the curation of sites, but I generally CBA interacting with people that much, I used to be highly active on forums like Madonion/futuremark, [H], etc, but those days are long behind me and these days, I post a bit on Reddit and talk to my wife and that's about it.

If things proceed to go to shit as much as it has, I may open it up anyway, mostly because maintaining and re-curating sites is a drag on its own.

The amount of sites that were once great tech spots that then got gulped up by the same ol same ol big tech sites to be turned into generic shit, it's not that they become uncountable, it's that it's almost every single one of them.

The best still seems to be simply posting questions on the few OG computer/tech forums that managed to survive.

For hardware and OS, places like ServeTheHome, [H], Anandtech, Techpowerup, etc.

For programming information, it's so murky I can't even suggest any specific sites anymore, not even Stack.

Phone/Tablet info, even XDA is getting murky, mostly because a lot of users there only watch the forum for their specific device, so if yours isn't one that is used by a lot of people, info gets super limited.

It's gotten bad out there.

No need to invent.

That's how originally search engines, including Google, Yahoo and all the other big ones worked.

You didn't get indexed by default.

You either got indexed by being submitted or by being referenced often by one or more well represented sites.

It's only later in the game they started crawling everything.

Someone should invent a search engine that allows for curated sources. For most things, I'd love to search among the top few thousand sites, and exclude everything else.

While I was typing up and fleshing out an idea on curated source lists for search engines, your post beat me to the punch.

As others have said, a curated internet is very old timey, and kind of limited, but I think what I fleshed out could work well with the modern internet, and be interesting. Maybe a major search engine might actually take up the task if user demand is there.

Quality of search results from google have been downward tending for years, and maybe it will boost the quality of results again (albeit with their ads still stuck in the results).