Chapter 9: Making Use of Directories

In This Chapter

• Introducing Google Directory

• Searching the Directory

• Navigating the Categories

• Managing your Directory Search Results

• Learn about the Open Directory Project

• Submitting a Site to the Open Directory Project

• Google Directory in your own language

Google Directory (http://directory.google.com) is a completely different view of the Web than you might be used to experiencing through Google. In addition to using Google’s powerful search technology, searching can be done manually by the user. To facilitate this type of browsing, Google Directory organizes the World Wide Web by topic into categories.

Google Directory is based on the open source project called DMOZ or, for people who don’t speak acronym, Open Directory Project. The primary difference between experiencing the Web through directories and by simply performing Google searches and surfing through the results is that directories - and in particular this one - are edited by humans. While dependent upon someone else’s opinion of what may or may not be relevant to a topic, it manages to cut out most of the non-relevant information that tends to overwhelm someone searching the Web.

Google Directory is not a clone of the DMOZ directory. Instead, Google applies its PageRank technology to the information submitted by the DMOZ editors. This ensures that results are organized by order of importance. Even in a human-edited directory with more than 1.5 million entries, it’s easy for the result you are looking for end up lost in the weeds. PageRank ensures that the most relevant and most important pages appear first.

Google Directory information also forms an information base for Google’s standard Web search. When additional information exists in the Google Directory for a Web page, Google displays this information as part of its normal Web search.