Chapter 3. Searching the Google Directory

Google indexes billions and billions of web pages in its search database. That's both good and bad. The huge volume of pages virtually guarantees that you'll find something useful, while all that volume sometimes makes it difficult to separate that one useful page from the thousands (or millions) of less useful ones. It's kind of a needle and haystack problem.

By indexing literally billions of web pages, the Google search engine adopts a brute force approach. You get plenty of quantity, but the quality of results isn't always up to par.

When the quality of results matters, it's sometimes better to view a list of pages that have been personally selected for their content and appropriateness. (As opposed to letting the GoogleBot and PageRank Algorithm do the gathering and selecting for you, that is.) So if it's handpicked results you want, you want a web directory, not an automated search engine.

Not surprisingly, Google offers just this type of human-edited directorycalled, also not surprisingly, the Google Directory.