Subject Directories |
Sacramento
City College Library Online Internet Orientation |
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| Part 1 of 4 | ||
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Subject Directories |
Sacramento
City College Library Online Internet Orientation |
|
| Part 1 of 4 | ||
|
|
||
What are Subject Directories? Search engines are probably the search tools you use for most of your searching on the Internet. Subject directories are another major Internet search tool, although you may never have used a subject directory. Here are links to 2 different subject directories: A subject directory is similar to a search engine. It is also a database of websites. The interface of a subject directory is similar to that of a search engine. The user enters his/her search and results appear that match the search terms. The main difference the user will notice is that they will obtain a small number of results rather than millions of them. Many
subject directories also organize all of their websites into categories. And so
the user may either enter a search term or surf through
hierarchical categories (ranging from general to specific) to find websites on a
topic. Subject Directories vs. Search Engines So, how are subject directories and search engines different? Like search engines, subject directories are databases of websites. However, unlike search engines, the information is collected and organized by people rather than machines. Computers can collect and organize millions of websites in the database. And so search engines are much, much larger than subject directories. You will obtain many fewer results with subject directories than with search engines. But remember, when you’re doing research quality is much more important that quantity. People are much better at finding and evaluating the quality of information than computers. Subject Directories and Quality Although
you'll find many fewer results with a subject directory, the results will be
much higher quality. You will do much better with your research if you start with
a subject directory rather than a search engine. You don’t need 88 million websites that you’ll have to evaluate on
your topic. You really only want a
few good ones. There are several internet subject directories that have been set up by
librarians. The websites that they list have already been evaluated and the
quality will be high. We
particularly recommend
these as a starting point for your Internet research. Since most Internet searchers only use items from the first
page of results, it’s particularly important that all of the results on that
page are of good quality. Using one
of the subject directories organized by librarians greatly increases the odds
that you’ll hit a good website the first time around. Note that Sacramento City College librarians have compiled a subject directory on the Library web site. For this tutorial, we'll take a look at the subject directory Librarians' Internet Index and then do a little comparison with the search engine Google. |
Last Update January 24, 2008
