The Yahoo! Directory Has HigherQuality Results than Yahoo! Web Search—but Fewer of Them

Yahoo! was created as a hand-picked directory of Web sites. Over the past
decade, however, the Yahoo! directory has become a less and less important
part of the Yahoo! pantheon of services—to the point where many users don’t
even know the directory exists. After all, if you use the search box on the
Yahoo! home page—which Yahoo! obviously wants you to do—you pass over
the directory entirely.
That’s too bad, because the Yahoo! directory is actually a pretty good assemblage
of what’s out there on the Web. It’s also arguably the easiest search site
for Web surfers to use.
It all boils down to the basic difference between a directory and a search index.
You see, there are two approaches to organizing all the information on the
World Wide Web. One approach is to use a special type of software program
(called a spider or crawler) to roam the Web automatically, feeding what it finds
back to a massive bank of computers. These computers hold indices of the
Web—in some cases, entire Web pages are indexed; in other cases, only the
titles and important words on a page are indexed. This approach is the one
taken by the big search engines, such as Google, AltaVista, and HotBot—and
by Yahoo!’s Web Search feature (which is actually supplied by Google)