[animaomnium]

There's a big number of things you can search for, but it's a finite number. There are certainly people interested in curating resources for their specific niche in exchange for curated resources in other niches, across the entire internet. Perhaps through a social web of trust. We need a new search engine resistant to sybil attacks. One that takes the social aspect of searching—connecting you with the relevant experts—into account.

[jprete]

It's a challenging problem. The whole of Web 2.0 is built on lowering scaling costs as far as possible. The trust problem is itself very big - if someone makes the modern equivalent of the Yahoo directory, how do they establish trust that they're only incentivized by site quality? If it's a graph of trust, how does one handle the subtle changes in baseline expectations and norms that qualify as "trustworthy", when moving from one part of that graph to a distant part? If such a system goes massive, how does one prevent the member nodes from being overwhelmed by requests, or even from offers to contribute by people more interested in Internet karma than giving quality contributions?

It's a tough nut to crack.