[femto]

The "old" Internet is still there in parallel with the "new" Internet. It's just been swamped by the large volume of "new" stuff. In the 90s the Internet was small and before crawler based search engines you had to find things manually and maintain your own list of URLs to get back to things.

Ignore the search engines, ignore all the large companies and you're left with the "Old Internet". It's inconvenient and it's hard work to find things, but that's how it was (and is).

[therobots927]

Well then in that case, maybe we need a “vetted internet”. Like the opposite of the dark web, this would only index vetted websites, scanned for AI slop, and with optional parental controls, equipped with customized filters that leverage LLMs to classify content into unwanted categories. It would require a monthly subscription fee to maintain but would be a nonprofit model.

[femto]

That's the original "Yahoo Directory", which was a manually curated page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo#Founding

The original Yahoo doesn't exist (outside archive.org), but I'm guessing would be a keen person or two out there maintaining a replacement. It would probably be disappointing, as manually curated lists work best when the curator's interests are similar to your own.

What you want might be Kagi Search with the AI filtering on? I've never used Kagi, so I could be off with that suggestion.