Way back in the mid 90’s, a little something called the Internet was being born and released to the masses. This was an age of old, dinosaur technologies, where CRT monitors were all that existed to display the very basic and rudimentary web pages that the web comprised of back in these early days. This was the age before search engines as we know them today existed, and the method people used to find the information they needed on the web (if it existed, which was real iffy back then) was through page directories.
There were many directories in existence back in these ancient times, but two stood out above the rest as the largest and most used directories: Yahoo! And the Open Directory Project, both of which still exist today. Some directories, including Yahoo, had a search engine feature, but these search engines only searched through their respective directories themselves, not the web at large. This did limit the results of the searches, as pages not listed in the directory would never be displayed.
This changed in’98 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’98 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’98, 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 survival and usefulness of directories today is all thanks to the fundamental difference between directories and automated search engines: directories are not automated. Directory listings remain a result of human intervention and activity, and thanks to this fact that every directory entry has been created and modified by a human being directories remain a useful source of information.
Ironically enough, a site being listed on a directory also has its search engine rank increased. This means that a lot of site owners will still apply to have their websites listed on the more popular directories, which in turn keeps these directories useful when hunting for information.
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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