How do subject directories work?

Answer 1

How does a subject directory work?Most subject directories are organized in similar ways. Subject directories effectively use hypertext links, enabling you to work your way from broad categories to specific topics. By hypertext-linking the pages, these directories can be very topic-focused. Most subject directories provide summary descriptions for every link, allowing you to get an idea of what is on a listed page without having to actually open it.

If you want to know more about Caribbean vacations, searching for the phrase "Caribbean vacation" may not be the best way to go. Instead of keyword searching, which will get you some links to hotel websites and other commercial sites, you are better off browsing through the Open Directory's categories to find specific references and results, such as first person accounts of traveling in this area, reviews of hotels and restaurants, or suggestions of things to do in the area. In this case, you would click through the following categories:

Recreation > Travel > Regional > Caribbean

This takes you to a series of on-target Caribbean vacation online resources and information. Most subject directories allow you to keyword search them, but then you are not searching the full-text of the documents contained on the specific pages the link is pointing to. So you could miss important documents altogether by using the search function in a directory. Most subject directory databases tend to be much smaller than search engines' databases.

To make up for that, most directories supplement their results with additional results provided by search engine partners. For example, a search on Yahoo! will list additional results from its partner, Inktomi. AOL uses Google for its search results, but AOL uses its own Open Directory as its partner for directory results. When the directory search fails to provide any results, the search engine partner's results are listed as primary results.