History Of The Web Directory

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.

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 reason directories are still used and useful is because they have one thing over algorithm-based results that modern search engines employ. What is this advantage? It is quite simple, really: where the majority of search engine results are largely automated, directory listings are still created and modified by real people. Every page on the directory has been looked at and reviewed by a real person (or persons), which means in most cases that the pages themselves are qualitatively judged instead of quantitatively ranked based on keyword density, meaning that it is impossible for people to easily trick directories into listing or promoting their pages.

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.

Thanks to these two advantages, directories are not likely to go the way of the dinosaur for several years yet.

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