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NewsHour Teacher Center Blog
February 8, 2008

If you’re searching for online sites with resources for your classes, you can do a regular search, or you can navigate through Web Directories, which do a certain amount of organizing and weeding for you.

Unlike totally automated searching of web page content, Web Directories are created and maintained by human being experts who decide whether a given website deserves to be listed in the Directory and, if so, in which category (or categories) it belongs. Yahoo divides the world wide web into 14 top level categories, Google starts with 16. Top categories are divided into hundreds of subcategories, arranged hierarchically for (reasonably) intelligent navigation.

The first Google Directory top category is ARTS shown here with sample 2nd level categories. Just below it is the blue “Continue reading” link .. click it now to show many more Google Directory top categories.

ARTS : Literature Humanities Comics Writers Resources

BUSINESS : Companies Entertainment History Healthcare
HEALTH : Senses Alternative Fitness Aging History Nutrition Teen
HOME : Family Gardening News Emergency Prep Do-It-Yourself
KIDS..TEENS : Society School News Teen Life Arts Health
NEWS : Media Newspapers Current Events Media Headline_Links
REFERENCE : Education Libraries Maps Biography Dictionaries Quotations
REGIONAL : Asia Europe North America Africa South America Caribbean
SCIENCE : Educational Resources Social Sciences Reference Environment
SOCIETY : Issues Education Genealogy Religion Military Urban Legends
WORLD : German Spanish French Italian Japanese Korean

Directory topics make it easy it is to discover new resources. Click any of the links above to start exploring! After a few minutes of clicking and following Directory leads you may find it hard to get back to this page, unless you’ve already made a browser favorite or bookmark for this blog, which is never a bad idea!

Here are some examples of illustrative deeper jumps into the Google Directory structure:

Arts>Literature>Myths and Folktales>Myths
Kids and Teens>School Time>Social Studies
Society>Issues>Immigration>News and Media
Regional>Africa>News and Media

Yahoo! Directory is created and privately maintained by a paid staff of editors. Google Directory uses the categories created and maintained by dmoz.org, the “Open Directory Project.” Thousands of volunteers share responsibility for gatekeeping and maintaining assigned sections of the dmoz directory in their areas of expertise. I have a soft-spot for successful collaborative projects, and dmoz has demonstrated its staying power and effectiveness, with more total resources categorized than Yahoo. Google Directory value adds its own empirically computed pagerank (those green bars) to prioritize dmoz resources within categories rather than listing them alphabetically. Whether you use dmoz or Google Directory, you access the same pool of categorized web resources; Yahoo! Directory may turn up some different resources and vice versa.

Other human edited directories of the web include about.com and internet public library.

So, do you find directories helpful? What are some of your hints for using searches or directories effectively?
Share your experiences! While you may think your techniques are obvious, I’ll bet they could help another teacher who hasn’t had time to experiment.

In Peace,
Brian

Author

Comments

Posted:
02/20/08 at
04:59 PM
Kerrie Smith : Just thought I'd leave some information here about Education Network Australia (edna), Australia’s leading online resource collection and collaborative network for the education and training community. The URL is http://www.edna.edu.au Pop DownUnder and have a look. Teachers might also be interested in OzProjects (http://ozprojects.edu.au) where they can join in collaborative projects with an Aussie flavour. Or pop over and see where I work mainly at edna Groups (http://groups.edna.edu.au)
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