Archive for November, 2009
History Of The Web Directory
Back at the dawn of the Internet, where CRT monitors were the way of the world and the web page was a very simple thing, search engines were not the primary way of finding information. In fact, for several years after the Internet was released to the public, search engines as we know them today simply didn’t exist. To find information, people had to use a different mechanism, and that mechanism was known as the page directory.
While there were several directories back in these good old days, there were two that stood out and became the largest and most used directories of the Internet at the time: the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project. Yahoo shortly afterward released a “search engine” service, but it was another face of the same service: this “search engine” (and other engines of this time) only searched through the directory for results, so any website that had not yet been manually added to the directory didn’t exist as far as the engine was concerned
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.
The survival and usefulness of directories today is all thanks to the fundamental difference between directories and automated search engines: directories are not automated. Directory listings remain a result of human intervention and activity, and thanks to this fact that every directory entry has been created and modified by a human being directories remain a useful source of information.
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 advantages that directories remain today, and why they are not likely to go extinct for several years to come.
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