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Before delving into the intricacies of search engines, let's look at some other ways of finding information on the web. Search engines are not the only and often not even the best way to access information on the Internet.

Web Directories/Subject Guides/Portals

Web directories are organized subject catalogues that allow the web searcher to browse through lists of sites by subject in search of relevant information. Yahoo, Galaxy, Google Directory, Lycos, and the Open Directory are select lists of links to pertinent websites. Directories were once viewed as the future of the Internet because they could sift through the mountains of information and millions of websites to offer only the best and most relevant. However, directories have truly fallen by the wayside over the past several years with the rise of Google and, even more importantly, wikis in general and in particular. Directories continue to recede in importance and value to researchers as they are increasingly replaced by better alternatives, including, by which a voluntary community of searchers shares expertise to create more focused searches with more relevant results. The reason for the decline of directories is obvious: directories are simply too manpower intensive and expensive to keep up with the ever-changing and expanding web. I would say at this point directories, while not dead, are probably moribund. Directories rely on people to create their listings Obviously, this is a much more labor-intensive business than operating a search engine robot. Websites indexed in a directory are either described/evaluated by editors/reviewers or rely on descriptions provided by web page owners who may pay for placement in a directory. When you search a directory, the only retrievals will come from those descriptions, so keep this in mind. Although directories give you a much more limited view of the web, directories do have their own utility. Most directories also have a backup search that provides responses to queries that don't match anything in the directory listings.

Subject guide databases are always smaller than those of search engines, which means that the number of hits returned tends to be smaller as well. On the bright 28