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
This changed in 1998 when Google appeared and revolutionized search engines, but that is, as they say, another story. The impact of this turn of events to web directories, however, is another matter. The events of 1998 signaled the beginning of the end of the golden age of directories, with the majority of people changing habits over the course of the next four years. These dinosaur directories were believed to be going extinct, but their usefulness did not end in 1998, and here we are years later where directories are still used quite frequently, even if they aren’t used nearly as much as they were during their golden age.
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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