News Background Search About Us Search Tools Classification and Categories for Browsable Topic Directories Directories are organized sets of links, such as Yahoo, which allow you to show the the scope and focus of your information. You can have a directory whether you are on a single host, a large multi-server site, an intranet or covering a topic on the Web. At each level, the category names provide instant context information to users. There are a number of applications that can help you do this, although the amount of automation can vary.
Some programs simply allow anyone to manually add a URL to a specific category by submitting a site.
Others allow human catalogers to create sophisticated rules to specify certain words and phrases which will place a page in a category. Still others attempt to automate the entire process, grouping pages into topics based on the contents. When evaluating these applications, remember that they are simply software. No matter the elegance of the algorithms, a computer program can never truly understand the concepts involved in a page , as a human can do, and will sometimes place pages in the wrong categories. To serve your site users better, plan for a significant amount of human cataloging and editing.