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Directories, portals, gateways, navigation services-whatever you call them, it seems as if a new one appears on the Web every week. It seems as if every large company is creating its own or at least acquiring a stake in one.
Why do so many firms want one? Because in 1994 two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University started keeping track of their personal interests on the Internet. Their lists grew into Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo!), which now offers a database of links to more than 700,000 sites in more than 25,000 topical categories. Last September, traffic on Yahoo!'s Web properties reached 144 million page views per day.
The success of Yahoo! has brought competitors who want a share of the visitors and advertising money such sites attract. According to Forrester Research, portals get 15% of all Web traffic and 59% of online advertising revenues.
But what's a researcher to do? Stay with Yahoo! or explore every new competitor that comes along claiming to be better? Maybe a brief directory of directories would help. Here are overviews of three relatively new sites-Snap, LookSmart, and eBLAST.
All three have much in common with Yahoo! They all use human editors to review and organize links. They all let you search or browse. And they all offer ancillary features such as news or other types of information. But there are some important differences, too. After the overviews, a few sample searches will help you compare and contrast the type of results you can expect from each directory.
SNAP TO IT
Snap's home page (http://www.snap. com) even looks a lot like Yahoo!'s. Primary categories are listed in two columns. Links to a few subcategories appear below the main ones.
At Snap, the 16 primary categories are Arts & Humanities, Business & Money, Computing & Internet, Education, Entertainment, Health, Kids & Family, Living, Local, News, Oddities, People & Society, Science & Technology, Shopping, Sports, and Travel.
Snap also offers "resource centers." They're pages of links on specific topics combined with relevant information from such content partners as CNN Interactive, E! Online, CBS SportsLine, and Bloomberg. Resource centers correspond to directory topics. For example, the Computing & Internet topic includes the Tech Guide resource center. To access one,...