No matter how many eager young taxonomists Yahoo gives stock options to, it can't keep up with the quantity of pages on the Web. That's what keeps Mr. Culliss, for example, from using editors at Direct Hit. But some experts believe hand-picked directories will always be more satisfying for consumers. I don't think machines can cut it for the bulk of general-purpose searches. While Yahoo doesn't disclose how many editors it has, the company as a whole has fewer than 1,000 employees.
Some observers even see a dark side to the effort.
With about a half-million sites, Open Directory is gaining fast on Yahoo, whose directory includes more than a million sites. And a coordinated team of in-house editors can produce better results than a fleet of volunteers, according to the company. Even traditional search engines admit they are going to need help from the new people-powered searching techniques. Ask Jeeves tries to match the questions to a database of about seven million similar-sounding questions to which it already knows the answers. Improvements in its answering capabilities are mostly dependent on the work of human editorial teams, who add new questions.