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Search Engines vs. Browseable Directories If you'd like to know what information a search engine such as Alta Vista has on, say, Travel in Belize, you have to search. You do not know what a search engine contains until you search it. Simple as that. Everything contained within a search engine is a mystery until you start picking away at it, using different keywords, refining your searches, and trying again and again. Even then, you do not have a complete picture of what the engine contains. What you do have is a series of search results pages that emerge from the various keywords you've chosen. So for the above example, you might try: "travel," "tourism," "vacation," "ecotourism," and the like. You'll probably come up with a fairly good collection of results, but will you ever have access to all the sites about mutual funds the search engine contains? No. Not so with directories. Yes, you can search a directory such as Belize.Net. But, you can also browse through its rich hierarchy of information: a vast collection of categories and sub-categories created by people, not computer programs. And by browsing, you can have in front of you a good, perhaps complete listing of all the sites that cover a particular subject--in this case, Travel. Just look for the category. So, one important difference between search engines and directories is that directories have structure. You can navigate this structure and peruse the information contained within it, making choices as you go along. With a directory such as Belize.Net, you can choose to navigate your way to a particular category--example again, Travel in Belize--and once there, know that you haven't missed anything. That, very simply, is why browsing works so well.
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