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 Central Directory

Central Directory is a highly promoted web directory which is search engine friendly and has a good number of sites listed in the directory. Central Directory requires a one time fee from submitters to ensure the quality of the site listed in this directory
 

Web Directory and Search Engine

Date Added: May 15, 2007 07:05:34 PM
Over the past ten years or so, the Internet has changed dramatically from a small community of sites that people used to find information into a giant shopping mall with billions of web pages about pretty much every subject you can think of, and many that you wouldn’t like to imagine. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways in which we can find pages that we want to see. The main two ways of finding a page about a subject that you are interested in are a web directory and search engine.
 
Both kinds of site may appear similar at first glance in the way that they present the informative lists of other web pages, but for all the similarities they share, a web directory and search engine are very different products, and compile information in entirely different ways.
 
A web directory uses a manually edited data base that sites opt into. The data base is then categorized into subjects, and then subdivided into more specific sub categories, until each website listed is in a group that is entirely relevant to it.
 
A search engine works in a completely different way. Instead of being manually edited and compiled, a large search engine like Google employs a computer program called a spider that goes out and follows every link it can find, then examines the content it finds, and copies it into a data base. This data is then automatically rated according to various conditions such as how many pages link to it, how many times a particular phrase appears in the body of the text, and how relevant the title is to the content.
 
When someone tries to find a site using a directory, they navigate manually through the categories to find a list of sites that matches their needs. On the other hand, when someone tries to find information using a search engine, the computer automatically finds pages from the whole Internet and ranks them according to relevance so the user can find what they are looking for,
 
Both a web directory and search engines have many benefits for the user. A directory will usually only include quite high quality sites that have passed the approval of the editors, while because a search engine is able to automatically index billions of pages, it can return a result from a bigger sample of the web than a directory can, and will typically connect a user to the exact page they want rather than the index page of a website.
 
There are a new generation of sites that combine the best features of a web directory and search engine, using the power of their user base to rank sites according to popularity and by tagging them with words that are relevant to them It could well be that sites like del.icio.us, which are a directory compiled by millions of users are the search engine of the future, and as they develop a larger user base, and more advanced ranking technology, these social directories could become the search engines of tomorrow.