Web directories are collections of links and annotated web pages.
Web directories are the oldest ways of navigation on the WWW. Two important examples from the very early days still exist: Open Directory Project and Yahoo! Directory.
ODP or DMOZ (Directory Mozilla) is the first large scale volunteer project on the Web. Consists of many international/language versions. All edited by human volunteers. The ODP contains currently 4 million sites, collected by 74,719 editors over 590,000 categories. Quality is highly regarded, also by web search engines. ODP can be found on Google and Gigablast and in many other places.
The commercial competitor of ODP and the start of one of the most successful web companies. Used to work with human editors as well, but that is probably not the case anymore.
Very nifty feature of Yahoo! Directory is the clues for other subject specific directories, e.g. Dictionaries
When do You use search engines and when directories?
Search engines:
- time constraints
- specific questions
Directories:
- to explore a subject
- to discover new sites
- with new subjects
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WG 20061212
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