Cloudhiker

A short History about Cloudhiker Categories

The categories of Cloudhiker have been the same since its launch back in 2021. Since then, the site has changed a lot and multiple times people have shared feedback that the categories are not perfect. Yes, indeed. Putting every possible website into categories is extremely hard. If there are too few categories, those will blow up and become so large that they lose their meaning. On the other side if they are too specific, there will be too few sites in them, and users are confronted with choosing between dozens or even hundreds of categories. Until now, I believe that the number of categories is good enough.

A few weeks ago, I decided to revisit the categories based on the feedback and the size of the previous Technology category. Users said that putting mechanics close to something like programming is problematic. And that's correct.

The 20th Category: Internet & Software

So, as the first big change to the Cloudhiker categories, Technology was split into two:

• Technology & Hardware (Engineering, Mechanics, Computers,...)
• Internet & Software (Web Development, Programming, Software Design,...)

The split into physical and virtual technology is a good compromise and is easily to understand for everybody. Additionally, some colors have been reorganized so that every category has its place in the category list.

How was it done?

The thing about splitting or renaming categories is that all existing websites need to be checked. For the Technology category, about 5000 websites needed to be checked. It might be possible that a few websites are in the wrong category.

The first step was to run every website through a local LLM (Gemma3 to be precise) and let it guess its category from the URL. That worked way better than I expected and reduced the number of manual reviews down to about 1500 sites. Actually, most of those 1500 sites were pretty clear from the URl alone, so I spent way less time than I expected. So here we are, with a fresh category system for Cloudhiker and a new Internet & Software category.

If you have questions, feel free to contact me. Also, please report any websites you think is in the wrong category.