Directory Search Engine | Web Directories
Directory Search Engines
Searching for content or web pages submitted by hand (in person). In other words materials are found and maintained by a human being. For example, Yahoo used to only search a directory of submitted pages.
Web Directories
Web directories existed before the search engines. As the name implies, web directories are directories where different resources are gathered. Similar to desktop directories (folders), where you gather files in a folder based on some criterion, Web directories are just collections of links to sites. The sites in a Web directory are listed in some order (ex., alphabetic).
Search directories are fundamentally different from search engines in the two ways:
- Most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders. Site owners submit URLs.
- The second difference – no spiders – means that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than sit and wait for the spider to come to your site.
Examples of Web Directories
There are hundreds of search directories. Most popular one is DMOZ (Directory Mozilla). It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. Another popular general-purpose search directory is Yahoo! Directory.
Besides general-purpose web directories, there are many topical (topic-wise) ones. The Environment Directory lists links to environmental sites only, while The Radio Directory lists thousands of radio stations worldwide. There are also many local and national Web directories, which accept links to sites about a particular region or country only.
Search Engine Components: A Search Engine has 3 Basic Parts.
- Spider (crawler, link finder): a computer program that harvests web links from page to page
- Index: a database that is organized and searchable of the Spider’s harvested results
- Search and retrieval mechanism: Software that allows users to search the Index and return results in a predetermined order.
