When to use Subject Directories

Keyword search engines find web pages with specified content, whereas directories find you websites of a specified subject.

This is the essential difference.

Whether we use them depends on our research. Sometimes you want an organised list of sites about a certain subject. Sometimes you want pages with certain words on them.

We make this kind of judgement automatically when using reference books. We'd look for "Football" in the contents section at the front of a sports book, but we'd use the keyword index at the back for pages with "Brian Clough" on them.

A search for "golf" on Google finds 32.5 million pages, each with the word "golf" on them. This will include great pages about the sport golf, lousy pages with the word golf on them somewhere and stuff about the Volkswagen Golf!

A trip to the Golf section of Yahoo or Google Directory will give you a nice quality controlled list of sites about the sport golf, with optional subcategories on Golfing Etiquette, Gay & Lesbian Golf, Golf courses etc.

Sometimes you can express a concept in many ways. A search for "Alternative medicine" in Google will bring up many pages, but might miss ones that use the words "alternative therapy" or therapies, or holistic or homeopathic or herbal etc. etc.

However you get all the permutations by going to the "Alternative Medicine" section of a subject guide.

Directories are also great for browsing round a subject area.

The alternative medicines section of Yahoo has sub-categories on Trepanation (drilling holes in your head), Apitherapy (bee venom therapy) and Rolfing.... 

You may not have heard of any of these before you visited Yahoo, so it would have been impossible to do a keyword search for them.