Someone once said, “Let information be freely available in digital form for humanity to peruse as it needs and wants,” and behold, the Internet was born. The Internet was born over the course of many months instead of seven days, but it remains a most miraculous source of information, with it being easy to search and navigate and giving millions opportunities to learn things that they may otherwise never know. The Internet, however, was not always so easy to use, and before search engines made everything really easy to find there was another method of finding information on the web. This method involved the use of something called web directories, which still exist in force today.
There were many directories in existence back in these ancient times, but two stood out above the rest as the largest and most used directories: Yahoo! And the Open Directory Project, both of which still exist today. Some directories, including Yahoo, had a search engine feature, but these search engines only searched through their respective directories themselves, not the web at large. This did limit the results of the searches, as pages not listed in the directory would never be displayed.
For several years directories enjoyed the status of the “go to guys” of the web. This was not to last, sadly, as some forward thinkers saw the potential limits of directories and how these would become more apparent as the Internet grew exponentially over the years. These forward thinkers happened to work at a small company called Google, and they developed what would become the most widely used search engine on the planet. Other search engines appeared following Google’s lead, and it seemed that directories would soon become a thing of the past. Directories have managed to hang on, however.
Directories have survived and prospered well after the rise of search engines because of the fundamental difference between how both systems work. Search engines are largely automated things that post results based on machine logic, whereas directories continue to be the result of human thought processes. Not only does this mean that directories can consistently deliver relevant information to the seeker (search engines do this for the most part as well, but you will occasionally get strange results from them), but it is impossible for website owners to easily fool a directory into listing their pages, meaning there are few useless pages in directories.
It is also worth mentioning, if only for the amount of irony inherent in this set of circumstances, that directory links also raise a page’s search engine rank in most search engines. This is the primary reason why most webmasters continue to request for their websites to be listed in these directories. This practice has actually extended the life of the directory, keeping them useful for people to browse around in long after they were supplanted by the mighty G. and other search engines as the primary method of information hunting.
It is thanks to these two factors that directories are still around and being used by millions of people regularly, and why this is likely to be the case for many years to come.
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