At this point it may be necessary. All of the search engines are essentially the same now and all you can find are mostly a handful of curated e-commerce sites. The "wide" part of the web has all but disappeared.
I never really used anything pre-google so I dont have enough context.
The yahoo directory page, i found, is very useful for discovery. I spent a good amount of time digging into sub-directories of recent interest for example [0] and found the limited number of links very very refreshing and of high quality. Links work, no ads, and i skipped what i did not think useful without fatigue. 10 mins later, i learned something new.
Google search for the same topic lends 2 screen fulls of ads and a popup asking for permission for my location and then this[1] garbage. 10 mins later, I had just spent time avoiding ads and paid content slop.
A very basic example of why "google it" isn't a great tool for discoverability any more. Simpler tools, better outcomes.
A modern looking, but fundamentally same concept of a categorized, curated directory could very well be an improvement over the current state of affairs.
How do people make use of such an aggregator? Do people checkout blogs individually and subscribe to feeds to individual blogs or interest? The sheer number of the collection dissuades me. I'm wondering, instead, if it'd be useful for the aggregator to offer an aggregated feed itself, but that might be too rand om a feed and subjects!
Such a great resource.It’s incredibly valuable for me personally since I’m always hunting for new blogs and new people to interview for my series. I also interviewed Phil, the creator of ooh back in February: https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-phil-gyford
