Section 3.2. Directories at Your Service

3.2. Directories at Your Service

Search engines are fantastically good at finding exactly what you're looking for if you know exactly what you're looking for.

Another approach is to window-shopto browse. For this purpose, the Internet offers you Web directories : massive online catalogs that are edited, sorted, and organized by humans, for humans .

Instead of searching for specific terms, you browse by category. It's a slower process because you have to click your way down, subtopic by subtopic. But you can bask in the security that some person, somewhere, actually visited the sites and made sure they're relevant to the topic you're researching .

On the downside, handcrafted directories can never be as up to date as the ones that automated Web spiders generate on the fly, because it takes humans more time to sift through mountains of data and notice things like broken page links.

The three big directories are run by Google (http://directory.google.com), Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com), and the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org). Each starts out with a page of general topics, like Arts, Computers, Recreation, Science, and so forth. To start exploring, just choose a broad category to delve into.

Suppose you want to learn more about organic chemistry , but don't have a specific area of interest within that yet. Click the Science link on the directory's main page. (Figure 3-5 shows the Open Directory Project.) The next page lists all sorts of areas that fall under the heading of Science, like astronomy, biology, and chemistry.

Figure 3-5. From the Open Directory's main page, start by choosing the general topic you're interested in. Keep clicking deeper and deeper into the directory until you find the precise aspect of the subject that interests you.

Click the Chemistry link, and the next page shows you links to information about dozens of aspects of chemistry, including academic departments, conferences, and software. Next on the list are the many different types of chemistry, including Organic. Numbers in parentheses beside each link tell you how many links to further information there are if you click here. Click the Organic link, and several subtopics having to do with organic chemistry appear. Pick the one you want and click again.

GEM IN THE ROUGH
Let Your Phone Do the Browsing

Most cellphones sold today have some sort of Web-browsing capability. To use it, you must sign up for your wireless carrier's data plan along with your monthly voice minutes. Also, unless your phone has a built-in keyboardlike a Treo, Sidekick, or BlackBerryit may take some fancy fingerwork to tap out Web addresses on your keypad.

If you have a favorite search page, find out whether it plays nice with your carrier and phone. All of the big search sites have some sort of mobile phone offering. For example, Google's is at http://mobile.google.com, Yahoo's is at http://mobile.yahoo.com/search, and MSN's awaits at http://mobile.msn.com.

Google and Yahoo offer a Short Message Service, or SMS , search that lets you send queries about local businesses as mini-emails. Try it the next time you're in a tight spot (like your guests are coming in 30 minutes, Rascal has cream on his nose, and you need 12 more cannoli pronto ).

It works like this. On your cellphone, create a new, outgoing text (SMS) message. (You may have to cuddle up with its instruction book to learn how.)

Address the message to 46645 for Google or 92466 for Yahoo. (Guess what those codes' alphabetic equivalents are?)

Then, in the body of the message, type your Zip code or city and a shortcut word like weather or movies or cannoli . (See the box in Section 3.1.2 for more on search shortcuts.) A few seconds later, the site rings you back with a text message containing the address of the nearest bakery.

Google's SMS service also lets you ask general questions. So if you draw a blank just before that big English test, you can ask Google SMS "Who wrote Moby Dick ?" and with luck "Herman Melville" arrives before it's time to turn off your phone.