Directories and guides quickly sprang up some on the Web, and some as books such as Ed Krol's seminal The Whole Earth Guide to the Internet. GNN was bought and squandered by America Online, but directories in the style of GNN, most notably Yahoo, blossomed.
Directories coarsely divide the Web up according to subject.
Search engines, by contrast, allow a fine-grained division based on individual words. Thoroughness and speed trade against each other. Search engines can be slow and laborious for the user compared with directories, but are usually far better for obscure material. Increasingly, the top sites are hybrids which incorporate elements of both approaches. All rights reserved.