Below we list some of the best search directories. Yahoo is the mother of all search sites, and by far the most popular. It is easy to use, and lists sites of high quality. David Filo and Jerry Yang created Yahoo when they were students at Stanford University in 1994. The lists grew longer and longer, though, and finally they created a database that was made available on the Web.
Businesses normally pay to their sites considered for inclusion.
The search directory continues to be the main attraction, though. At the time of writing it contains 2.6 million sites and 365,000 categories and has about 36,000 editors. The large number of editors ensures that the index is up to date, and there are few dead links. It has been argued, though, that the large number of editors means that the quality of the site selections may vary from category to category. Nevertheless, Open Directory Data are used by a large number of sites, including Netscape, HotBot, Dogpile, AOL search, Lycos and Pandia.