Posted on the 10-31-2009
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 web link directories.

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

This changed in 1998 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 1998 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 1998, 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 reason directories are still used and useful is because they have one thing over algorithm-based results that modern search engines employ. What is this advantage? It is quite simple, really: where the majority of search engine results are largely automated, directory listings are still created and modified by real people. Every page on the directory has been looked at and reviewed by a real person (or persons), which means in most cases that the pages themselves are qualitatively judged instead of quantitatively ranked based on keyword density, meaning that it is impossible for people to easily trick directories into listing or promoting their pages.

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.

Thanks to these two advantages, directories are not likely to go the way of the dinosaur for several years yet.