A subject directory is a database of titles, citations, and websites organized by category - similar to a filing cabinet containing folders with files. Categorization and indexing are performed by humans, not by machines or software. Users travel down a series of menus arranged by subject.
Unlike search engines, where a computer attempts to rank the most relevant results first, subject directories present results in categories, usually alphabetically, and the category titles vary from one subject directory to the next. The information is organized, evaluated and cataloged by a person - not by computer software - who ranks the material using pre-determined criteria.
The entire process of collecting, arranging, HTML coding, and annotating requires a great deal of human effort. As a result, subject directory databases tend to be much smaller than those of search engines. Subject directories are designed for ease of browsing.
It is important to make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial directories. Commercial web directories focus on advertising and other ways to generate a profit.
You can tell the non-commercial directories because they have no advertising, and they look for quality and authority of the underlying content rather than trying to create the largest directory. Several general directories put together by non-commercial organizations are excellent alternative resources for Internet researchers.
Yahoo! is the best known and largest of the commercial directories. Over the years, Yahoo! has morphed itself into a search engine. While Yahoo! offers a search engine and those results are organized by search engine crawling, you can still browse through its huge directory categories, which are broken into a dozen categories and will take you to a list of websites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor.
The largest and best known non-commercial subject directory is the Open Directory. Its data "powers" the directories of hundreds of sites, including many of the major search engines like Google, Lycos, AOL, HotBot, Netscape Search, among others. Open Directory is owned by AOL and has sixteen major topics coordinating more than 590,000 categories.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Jeffrey S. Lambert at 08272010
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