Single-topic website clearinghouse?
February 20, 2024 5:55 PM

In reading a recent post on the Blue, the question naturally arose whether there's anywhere online to find high-quality, special-interest websites of the sort that don't fare well on Google. Is that a thing?

In a less shitty universe, searching for "tube sock reviews" would give you a top hit of "Mimi's One-Stop Tube Sock Supersite" with all the information anyone could ever want about tube socks.

Sadly, we do not live in that world.

Is there a central repository or webring or anything for finding those specialist, expert sites?

(and, if not, anyone want to help build it?)
posted by DebetEsse to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
Marginalia is a search that prioritizes non-commerical sites.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:10 PM on February 20, 2024


I don't know of one off-hand, but if you're serious about building it, count me in. I would love to help with that.
posted by Meldanthral at 6:10 PM on February 20, 2024


The answers to this question seem relevant, but are focused on review sites: Obsessive single-focus review sites

Here's another about review sites: What are the best focused review sites?
posted by invokeuse at 6:19 PM on February 20, 2024


I'm not entirely sure this is what you're talking about, but I am a weirdo that really misses the pre-Google, organized by category, Yahoo site. (Does it bother anyone else when they stop to think that they've been actively using the internet for more than 25 years now? Am I the only one who still, subconsciously at least, thinks of it as "new"?)

I have no idea what that type of search site is called now, but I really, really miss it for the exploratory enjoyment. I mean, I can still do that on Wikipedia... but there's nowhere that I know of to do it on the internet at large.

So... if that's the sort of thing you want, and it doesn't exist, and someone decides to try and build it - I want to know, too.
posted by stormyteal at 9:04 PM on February 20, 2024


organized by category, Yahoo site.
So for a long time it was dmoz carrying the torch of hierarchical directory organization for web pages. They went belly up in 2017, but the good news is there are at least two decent successors! One is the Open Directory Project, which seems to basically be a static mirror of how dmoz was right before it ended. The other is Curlie , which is also based on dmoz but is actively edited and growing. Neither returns an amazing tube sock review site at a glance, but they will turn up all kinds of nice web pages that aren't shitty modern content mills. For instance this lovely site full of tons of information on lace making. is pretty typical of what I see on Curlie, but never do on Google.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:46 AM on February 21, 2024


Not sure how close this comes to what you're looking for, but ooh.directory is a categorized index of blogs.
posted by xedrik at 8:59 AM on February 21, 2024


It looks like Curlie is pretty close to what I was thinking of, and I plan to volunteer with them. Thanks, everyone!
posted by DebetEsse at 10:31 AM on February 21, 2024


Tangentially, I have stumbled upon many interesting sites by visiting Pinboard Popular Links. Note that I am NOT saying that Pinboard is a special interest Web site, but rather that they may lead you to some over time(???).
posted by forthright at 3:11 PM on February 21, 2024


I've just found About Ideas Now, it crawls pages looking for those sections and posts snippets, on first look I really like it. Currently at 7500 websites.
posted by unearthed at 11:24 PM on February 26, 2024


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