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
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 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 factors that directories are still around and being used by millions of people regularly, and why this is likely to be the case for many years to come.
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