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General directories and search engines for finding information, news, and photos on the Internet.
Web directories :
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Alleba
Alleba is a Philippine search engine. It was
created in 2001 by Filipino web designer Andrew dela Serna. Alleba started as a
project to index the best Filipino websites in a directory format and is one of
the first local directories behind those such as Yehey and Tanikalang Ginto. In
2004 it was named the WWW Virtual Library of the Philippines. Alleba has since
then helped Philippine websites gain more exposure on the Internet.
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AboutUs.org
AboutUs.org is a wiki Internet domain
directory. It lists websites along with information about their content. As a
wiki, AboutUs allows Internet users to add entries or modify information.
Ray King, Jay Westerdal, & Paul Stahura founded AboutUs in 2005. Later in 2006 a
small staff of five people in Portland, Oregon developed out the site, United
States. The staff has since expanded to more than thirty people and two
continents with an office in Lahore, Pakistan. In May 2007, Ward Cunningham,
developer of the first wiki, joined AboutUs as its chief technology officer.
AboutUs.org attracted at least 1.4 million U.S. visitors in July 2008.
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ArticleAlley
ArticleAlley is an online article directory of
various subjects and topics. Authors can post free articles to the directory
database without any membership. The articles are reviewed by a group of several
editors; and, if they meet ArticleAlley’s editorial guidelines, the articles are
then available for public view. ArticleAlley provides an RSS feed for each
author to syndicate his or her articles throughout the Web. The content of most
articles can be republished for free.
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Best of the Web Directory
Best of the Web Directory is a commercial web
directory providing websites categorized topically and regionally. Headquartered
in Uniondale, New York, BOTW also maintains offices in Orange, Texas, Rocklin,
California, Studio City, California and Highland Beach, Florida.
BOTW allows site owners to submit their websites for an expedited review, and
commercial sites are required to pay for the review. The company currently
offers a choice of either a one time fee or an annually recurring fee for an
editor to review the site for possible inclusion into the BOTW Directory. Review
fees are non-refundable, and only sites that meet the editorial guidelines are
listed.
Additionally, BOTW offers advertising in the form of category sponsorships.
Category sponsors are highlighted at the top of their applicable category, and
also receive enhanced placement in the BOTW search results. While sponsored
listings undergo the same editorial review as directory listings, if accepted,
the advertiser is granted more flexibility in category selection and more
control over their title and description.
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Biographicon
The Biographicon is an online directory of
biographies. The site also shows connections between individuals covered, and
explains the circumstances under which they met. It is based on a wiki model of
writing – anyone may edit or amend biographical entities.
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Business.com
Business.com is a business search engine and
web directory and pay per click advertising network. It includes Work.com, a
business-to-business community publishing platform where experts share advice on
common business topics in the form of how-to guides.
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Intute
Intute is a free Web service aimed at students,
teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education. Intute
provides access to online resources, via a large database of resources. Each
resource is reviewed by an academic specialist in the subject, who writes a
short review of between 100 to 200 words, and describes via various metadata
fields (such as which subject discipline(s) it will be useful to) what type of
resource it is, who created it, who its intended audience is, what time-period
or geographical area the resource covers, and so on. In early June 2008 Intute
provided 123,381 records. Intute is not to be confused with a simple search
engine - it is more like a hand-built directory of 'the best-of-the-web, for
academics'.
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Iraqi Virtual Science Library
The Iraqi Virtual Science Library is an Iraqi
Virtual Library providing Iraqi academics with access to recourses via the
internet. The library, launched in May 2006, initially provided access to more
than one million articles from 17,000 electronic journals and other resources.
Access to this knowledge is considered vital for the rebuilding of Iraq as it
will improve the curriculum which suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime. The
library is part of the overall plan to improve access to information in Iraq.
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JoeAnt
JoeAnt is a human edited directory offering "to
provide a directory of quality sites for Internet users". Created by a group of
a dozen former Go.com (Disney) volunteer Go Guides, JoeAnt was born of the
desire to provide relevant results in a wide variety of topics, and seeks to
work by forming a 'community' of editors where anyone interested can join in.
Volunteer editors are registered automatically and do not have to go through a
review process. The sites they submit go to a higher-level editor regardless of
topic. This allows the submitter to get a quick review of the site without the
likelihood that the reviewer is a competitor.
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LookSmart
LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK) is a search
advertising network and management solutions company based in San Francisco.
LookSmart provides search advertising products and services to text advertisers,
as well as targeted pay-per-click search and contextual advertising via its
Search Advertising Network. For publishers seeking to create their own branded
vertical advertising networks, LookSmart also licenses and manages search ad
networks using its award-winning AdCenter platform. LookSmart is one of the five
founding members of the IAB Click Measurement Panel.
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Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as
Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual
open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is owned by Netscape, but it
is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.
ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings
on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller
categories.
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OrganizedWisdom.com
OrganizedWisdom.com is a human-powered search
service for health (or human search engine) launched in alpha test in October
2006 by Steven H. Krein and Unity Stoakes. As of July 2008, the project is in
beta test. It differentiates itself from algorithmic search engines like Google,
as well as other directory sites like DMOZ and Yahoo by tracking and building
hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular health search terms.
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RPG Gateway
RPG Gateway, part of the RPG Nexxus site
network, is a human-edited global niche directory, specializing in role playing
games and related content. The purpose of RPG Gateway is to provide a single
resource listing all RPG and RPG-related sites for gamers. Its focus is on
pen-and-paper RPGs.
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SAYNOTO0870.COM
SAYNOTO0870.COM is a UK website with a
directory of non-geographic telephone numbers and their geographical
alternatives.
The website, which primarily started as a directory of alternatives to 0870
numbers (hence the name), also lists alternatives for 0844, 0845, 0871 and even
0800/0808 freephone numbers.
The vast majority of numbers are submitted by visitors to the website, but the
discussion board also offers a place for visitors to request alternatives
numbers if they are not included in the database. Some companies that advertise
a non-geographic number will also offer a number for calling from abroad -
usually starting +441 or +442 - this number can be used within the UK (removing
the +44 and replacing it with 0) to avoid the cost of calling non-geographic
numbers. Some companies will also offer a geographic alternative if asked.
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Timway
Timway (simplified Chinese: 添达; traditional
Chinese: 添達; pinyin: Tiān Dá) is a web portal and directory primarily serving
Hong Kong. It is designed for searching web sites in Hong Kong. The web sites in
each category are sorted according to their popularity and freshness instead of
alphabetical order. Timway supports web search query in English and Chinese, and
indexes web pages in both languages. It was founded by Tim Yu. Its primary
business is the sale of advertising on the Timway.com search portal. It
cooperates with Yahoo for the search engine marketing business. Also, a range of
Internet services are also provided including discussion forum, news and
education courses.
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VFunk
VFunk also known as (VF), a professional human
edited global niche web directory, that specializes in listing and categorizing
dance music & urban lifestyle related web site listings.
VFunk directory was founded in July 2004 by dance music promoters Ryan Clark and
Conner Lawrence with a view to provide a one stop resource for people with a
passion for dance music. Vfunk is a spam free & search engine friendly
directory. Volunteer editors search the internet for sites with original content
and also consider user-friendliness and web standards when reviewing each site.
VFunk offers listings for both commercial and non-commercial sites.
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Virtual Library museums pages
The Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) form a
leading directory of online museums around the world. The resource was founded
by Jonathan Bowen in 1994, originally at the Oxford University Computing
Laboratory in the United Kingdom. It is supported by the International Council
of Museums (ICOM) and Museophile. The main site moved to London South Bank
University and is now hosted as a wiki on Wikia.
The directory is organized in a distributed manner by country with around twenty
people in different countries maintaining various sections. Canada, through the
Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), was the first country to become
involved. The MDA maintained the United Kingdom section of museums, now the
Collections Trust.
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Virtual Museum of Computing
The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC) is an
eclectic collection of links and online resources concerning the history of
computers and computer science. It includes links to other related museums, both
real and virtual, around the world, as well as having its own virtual galleries
of information. A particular feature is the early computing pioneer Alan Turing,
among others.
This virtual museum was founded by Jonathan Bowen in 1994, originally at the
Oxford University Computing Laboratory in the United Kingdom. It is now
supported by Museophile and also forms part of the Virtual Library museums
pages, hosted at London South Bank University and mirrored around the world.
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WikiCity Guides
WikiCity Guides is an on-line publisher
providing local content on places, events, and people which could be of interest
to those associated with any of the 22,000 U.S. towns it covers. It serves these
communities much like a collection of city guides, yet as a wiki, any of its
readers are allowed to contribute content. With over 13 million pages, WikiCity
Guides ranks as one of the largest wikis in the world. WikiCity Guides
encourages, but does not require users to register to contribute.
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WikiPilipinas
WikiPilipinas (formerly known as Wikipiniana)
is an online, free content website which bills itself as a combination
"non-academic encyclopedia", web portal, directory and almanac for
Philippine-based knowledge. Like Wikipedia, it contains various articles on
Philippine-related topics. Unlike Wikipedia, many of the articles cover topics
that would otherwise be deemed unencyclopedic by the stricter Wikipedia. The
service for example, promotes the concept of original research and eschews the
larger encyclopedia's neutral point-of-view principle.
Conceived in late 2006 by Philippine publishing magnate Gaspar Vibal,
WikiPilipinas (as Wikipiniana) officially went live on June 12, 2007 with
several thousand Philippine-related articles forked from the English Wikipedia.
Its name was officially changed from Wikipiniana to WikiPilipinas a few weeks
later on the 7th of July. The service was formally launched at the 28th Manila
International Book Fair in late August of the same year.
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World Wide Web Virtual Library
The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the
first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory
of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim
Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva.
Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers,
who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert. It
is sometimes informally referred to as the "WWWVL", the "Virtual Library" or
just "the VL".
The individual indices, or virtual libraries live on hundreds of different
servers around the world. A set of index pages linking these individual
libraries is maintained at http://vlib.org/, in Geneva only a few kilometres
from where the VL began life. A mirror of this index is kept at East Anglia
(UK). A VL specific search engine has operated for some years and is now (VLsearch)
located on its own server at vlsearch.org.
The central affairs of the Virtual Library are co-ordinated by an elected
Council. A central index (the 'Catalog') is maintained and joint services
provided by the Council on behalf of the association.
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Yahoo! Directory
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which
rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first
offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in
October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it is still
being updated. The Yahoo! Directory offers two options for suggesting websites
for possible listing: "Standard", which is free, and a paid submission process
that offers expedited review. Payment is required when suggesting a commercial
site.
Yahoo! provides both a search engine and a directory service, and the directory
is searchable separately from the rest of their search engine results.
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Web directory :
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A web directory or link
directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to
other web sites and categorizing those links.
A web directory is not a search engine and does not display lists of web pages
based on keywords; instead, it lists web sites by category and subcategory. Most
web directory entries are also not found by web crawlers but by humans. The
categorization is usually based on the whole web site rather than one page or a
set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few
categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their
site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.
RSS directories are similar to web directories, but contain collections of RSS
feeds, instead of links to web sites.
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Scope of listing :
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Most of the directories are
very general in scope and list websites across a wide range of categories,
regions and languages. But there are also some niche directories which focus on
restricted regions, single languages, or specialist sectors. One type of niche
directory with a large number of sites in existence, is the shopping directory
for example. Shopping directories specialize in the listing of retail e-commerce
sites.
Examples of well known, general, web directories are Yahoo! Directory and the
Open Directory Project (ODP). ODP is significant due to its extensive
categorization and large number of listings and its free availability for use by
other directories and search engines.
However, a debate over the quality of directories and databases still continues,
as search engines use ODP's content without real integration, and some
experiment using clustering. There have been many attempts to make directory
development easier, such as using automated submission of related links by
script, or any number of available PHP portals and programs. Recently, social
software techniques have spawned new efforts of categorization, with Amazon.com
adding tagging to their product pages.
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Human-edited directories :
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A human-edited directory is
created and maintained by editors who add links based on the policies particular
to that directory.
Human-edited directories are often targeted by SEOs on the basis that links from
reputable sources will improve rankings in the major search engines. Some
directories may prevent search engines from rating a displayed link by using
redirects, nofollow attributes, or other techniques. Many human-edited
directories, including the Open Directory Project and World Wide Web Virtual
Library, are edited by volunteers, who are often experts in particular
categories. These directories are sometimes criticized due to long delays in
approving submissions, or for rigid organizational structures and disputes among
volunteer editors.
In response to these criticisms, some volunteer-edited directories have adopted
wiki technology, to allow broader community participation in editing the
directory (at the risk of introducing lower-quality, less objective entries).
Another direction taken by some web directories is the paid for inclusion model.
This method enables the directory to offer timely inclusion for submissions and
generally fewer listings as a result of the paid model. They often offer
additional listing options to further enhance listings, including features
listings and additional links to inner pages of the listed web site. These
options typically have an additional fee associated, but offer significant help
and visibility to sites and/or their inside pages.
Today submission of websites to web directories is considered as a common SEO
(search engine optimization) technique to get vital back-links for the submitted
web site. One distinctive feature of 'directory submission' is that it cannot be
fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission is a
tedious and time consuming job and is often outsourced by the webmasters.
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Bid for Position directories :
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Bid for Position
directories or also known as bidding web directories, are paid-for-inclusion web
directories where the listings of websites in the directory are ordered
according to their bid amount. They are special in that the more a person pays,
the higher up the list of websites in the directory they go. With the higher
listing, the website becomes more visible and increases the chances that
visitors who browse the directory will click on the listing. There are PHP
scripts (free and paid versions) for the management of bid for position
directories include phpLinkBid (paid), Link Bid Script (free), Astanda Directory
Project (ADP), and a modified link bid version for phpLD (phpLinkDirectory).
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