During the early days of the web, when there were only few thousand websites, there was a directory of websites. It was organized along categories and used lots of category analysts to place web sites in the appropriate place in the category tree. You could then browse your way along the category tree to get a list of websites in that sub category. That directory was Yahoo.

We all know what happened next. The web exploded with thousands if not millions of people creating websites, making a manually created directory unsustainable. Enter Search to the rescue. Google, with its smart ranking algorithms enabled us to find the pages we were looking for among what has now become billions of websites.

However, the web world has now grown so large that searches for common topics like “Obama Health Care” or “Ted Kennedy” return results in the millions. So how does one make sense of all these millions of results and find useful information that we can understand? To use a common metaphor, the web has become like a teenager’s stuffed closet. I think its now time for some house cleaning and organization.

How would we go about organizing the web?

1. The first step in any house cleaning is throwing all the junk away. This is an interesting problem in itself, as one person’s junk may be another’s treasure. Here is where a combination of editors, user preferences and statistics may guide us in figuring out what to keep.
2. The second step is to bring some sort of overall organization, given the space available. While disk space may be ubiquitous, what I mean here is the space in a users screen or on their mental shelf. So some sort of logical organization similar to what we see in libraries may be warranted. Additionally, we should definitely consider personalizing the layout of this library to a particular user’s interest and needs.
3. The third step is to make things easily findable. Here we can reintroduce search, but rather than searching the entire web, we only search the organized part of the web that we created in step 2.

Are there companies that are attempting to do this? Sure!! We have efforts from Google (iGoogle), Yahoo(myYahoo) that allow you to customize a homepage with a list of widgets/applications, tune the search results based on your search history (and the feedback of users) to name a few. Kosmix attempts to give users that essential overview about any topic by presenting information from the web in an easy to grasp fashion.

But in my opinion, no one has taken a step back and looked at this problem more holistically and tried to change the paradigm. I am hoping someone does, or we will all soon drown in this tidal wave of information. If you know of companies or sites that are working on this or if you disagree with my argument for a house cleaning, feel to chime in!