Are there directories for websites, instead of mindlessly prowling the Internet to see what is there? I mean, you either get an address from somewhere, or you just start randomly running words into search engines and seeing what comes up. I’d think there would be a directory somewhere, like a phone book or something.
god, have you been asleep ?
welcome to the SDMB. No, Wait! Welcome to the 'Net.
and endless others…they’re all search engines as well as directories…
The web is far too dynamic and large for directories to be comprehensive and accurate. I suppose you could go through name registries to get addresses, but then there’s also front end ISP’s, such as Geocities, which have thousands upon thousands of users, and the InterNIC registry (or whatever it’s called) would keep track of the registered names, but nothing about what the content is, or who’s publishing to the address.
Even if there was some way to capture a large portion of active addresses, unless the directory was updated constantly, it would quickly lose usefullness as sites died or changed.
It would be nice, but I don’t see how it could be done. I kind of like the randomness of search engines though. You start out looking for one thing, and end up engrossed in a totally different subject.
If you’re going to use a directory, at least use the best ones.
http://directory.google.com/
-The best directory, powered by the best search engine.
http://www.dmoz.org/
-The Open Directory Project can’t be beat for some things.
Doesn’t the Google directory use the Open Directory Project as it’s source? So it’s kind of the same thing. It is good though.
So, Smackboy is right. Google is the best because it uses the best.
I saw a project documenting the earliest days of the web, and the earliest versions of yahoo and Netscape’s “What’s Cool” list. Wish I could remember where it’s archived. It was a wonderful thing, seeing how the directory lists grew from almost nothing to thousands of pages, and beyond.
I see.
Thank you all.
Google maintains a ODP directory ( http://directory.google.com ) but its searches ( http://www.google.com ) sort by number of links to a site. The more other sites link to ‘site x’ the higher ‘site x’ is rated.
See this for a description of how it works:
http://www.sciam.com/1999/0699issue/0699raghavan.html