When you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, the Yahoo! Directory might be able to help you find it.
Yahoo! started in 1994 as Jerry Yang and David Filo’s organized list of favorite sites they’d found on the Web. Yahoo! has grown into much, much more, and many people think of Yahoo! as strictly a search company. Searching is great when you have a fairly good idea of what you’re looking for, but the Yahoo! Directory is a great place when you’d rather browse.
There are two different kinds of shoppers, and they illustrate the difference between searching and browsing. Some shoppers know exactly what they’re after and they want to find a store that carries that item, locate it in the store, and purchase it as quickly as possible. As with a web search, it helps to know a bit about what you’re looking for if this is your style. Other shoppers want to explore a particular store, see what the store offers, and choose an item if the right one comes along. This style of browsing is suited to people who want to get a larger survey of items in a particular category before they necessarily decide what they’re looking for.
Search forms are obviously built for searching. Directories are built for browsing. Unlike Yahoo! Search results, the Yahoo! Directory doesn’t try to include every page it can find from across the Web. Instead, the sites listed in the directory are hand picked and reviewed by paid Yahoo! editors.
If you were interested in looking at a sampling of weblogs about politics, you might try a search at http://search.yahoo.com with the query political weblog. You would find political weblogs in the search results, along with news articles about political weblogs, college papers about political weblogs, and even pages that just mention the terms political and weblogs. But browsing the Political Weblogs category in the Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Weblogs/Politics) will give you hundreds of links that have been selected by Yahoo! employees as being political weblogs.
Tip
The editors leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which side of the political spectrum any given weblog is on.
In addition to a less noisy list of sites to browse, you’ll find other evidence of the editors in the directory. Some sites will have a PICK! icon after them, along with a review of the site, like the last entry shown in Figure 1-51.
Click the “read review” link after any PICK! icon to see a brief description of the site, written by a Yahoo! editor. Other sites that have been chosen as cool by Yahoo! editors have an icon of sunglasses next to their listing.
Tip
If you spot a site in the directory that you’d like to see chosen and reviewed as a Yahoo! pick, you can email your suggestion to suggest-picks@yahoo-inc.com. You can read new picks at http://picks.yahoo.com.
Unlike the Yahoo! Search index, which is constantly looking for and adding new sites automatically, the Yahoo! Directory considers sites for inclusion only from user suggestions. You can suggest a site for the Yahoo! Directory by browsing to the category you’d like to see the site listed in and clicking the “Suggest a Site” link at the top of the page. From there, you’ll be asked to choose a paid or free listing (paying users get preferential treatment, including faster listing times). If you choose the free option, you’ll be asked to confirm the category and enter the site information.
Because there are hundreds of requests, it’s not possible for Yahoo! to include all of the suggested sites. But if you’ve found that your site isn’t included within a few weeks of submitting it, you can submit your site again.
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Multiple submissions in a short period are considered abuse by Yahoo! and the request won’t be considered.
If your site is accepted, it will appear at the top of the list with a NEW! icon next to it for two weeks. The Yahoo! for Webmasters chapter has even more details about adding a site to Yahoo! [Hack #92] .
Keeping up with recent additions to categories you’re interested in is a great way to find new sites. You can subscribe to new additions in a particular category via RSS, or add the category’s feed to your list of My Yahoo! news sources. To get started, browse to the Yahoo! Directory RSS Feeds page at http://dir.yahoo.com/rss/dir/index.php and choose from the categories listed.
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