A History Of Web Directories

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.

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.

Websites are continuously added to these directories by owners for several reasons, but one may surprise you. A page being listed on a directory will rise in the ranks of search engine results because of that listing. As a lot of focus right now is on rising to the top of search engine results, directories ultimately benefit from the way search engines rank pages.

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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