Way back in the mid 90’s, a little something called the Internet was being born and released to the masses. This was an age of old, dinosaur technologies, where CRT monitors were all that existed to display the very basic and rudimentary web pages that the web comprised of back in these early days. This was the age before search engines as we know them today existed, and the method people used to find the information they needed on the web (if it existed, which was real iffy back then) was through page directories.

There were many directories in existence back in these ancient times, but two stood out above the rest as the largest and most used directories: Yahoo! And the Open Directory Project, both of which still exist today. Some directories, including Yahoo, had a search engine feature, but these search engines only searched through their respective directories themselves, not the web at large. This did limit the results of the searches, as pages not listed in the directory would never be displayed.

This “directory golden age” had its days numbered, though. A small upstart called Google was already looking beyond the directory, wanting to show results from the entire Internet and not be limited to human edited directories. The release of the Google search engine in 1998 signaled the beginning of the twilight of directories as the primary way of finding information on the web, and many thought that the entire directory model would go the way of the dinosaur, never to be seen or heard from again. That did not end up being the case, however.

The reason directories are still used and useful is because they have one thing over algorithm-based results that modern search engines employ. What is this advantage? It is quite simple, really: where the majority of search engine results are largely automated, directory listings are still created and modified by real people. Every page on the directory has been looked at and reviewed by a real person (or persons), which means in most cases that the pages themselves are qualitatively judged instead of quantitatively ranked based on keyword density, meaning that it is impossible for people to easily trick directories into listing or promoting their pages.

It is also worth mentioning, if only for the amount of irony inherent in this set of circumstances, that directory links also raise a page’s search engine rank in most search engines. This is the primary reason why most webmasters continue to request for their websites to be listed in these directories. This practice has actually extended the life of the directory, keeping them useful for people to browse around in long after they were supplanted by the mighty G. and other search engines as the primary method of information hunting.

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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