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.
Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org
ODP or DMOZ (Directory Mozilla) was 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.
Yahoo! Directory http://dir.yahoo.com/
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
The Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org/
A good collection of Web Resources selected, annotated and maintained by students in Library and Information Sciences.
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
home
WG 20070312
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.