Simple Searching: Browsing Subject Directories

But before we use Yahoo! as a subject directory, let's explain how subject directories are created. We will use Yahoo! as a concrete example.

Yahoo! is a company in California that employs numerous people as 'Surfers'. A Surfer is assigned to find web pages on the WWW within their specific subject areas and add them to the Yahoo! directory.

So, Yahoo! is really just a collection of web pages that have been discovered by people and listed under subjects. It is much like a telephone directory for web pages.

There are other search tools on the WWW that work very differently from subject directories. We will look at one group of tools, called search engines, later.