@bsammon And this Archive.org capture of Lycos.com from 1998 contradicts your memory: https://web.archive.org/web/19980109165410/http://lycos.com/
See those links under “WEB GUIDES: Pick a guide, then explore the Web!”?
See the links below that say Autos/Business/Money/Careers/News/Computers/People/Education /Shopping/Entertainment /Space/Sci-Fi/Fashion /Sports/Games/Government/Travel/Health/Kids
That’s exactly what I’m referring to.
Here’s the page where you submitted your website to Lycos: https://web.archive.org/web/19980131124504/http://lycos.com/addasite.html
As far as the early search engines went, some were more sophisticated than others, and they improved over time. Some simply crawled the webpages on the sites in the directory, others
But yes, Lycos definitely was definitely an example of the type of web directory I described.
@joannaholman @degoogle Good point.
If it were run as a private company, I think the solution might be just to pay actual humans as employees.
If it’s a community-run project, the challenge would be to come up with a robust moderation system…