Classifying Web Sites

[Anne Callery]

Peter Kumaschow <peterk at opennet.net.au> wrote:

> The identify search engine provides a neat solution: get the creator of the document to classify 
> their own pages. Perhaps we could put the Library of Congress Classification codes in there as 
> well. Perhaps we could use meta tags rather than the identify system. We would need the libraries 
> to provide the resources to make it easy for authors to classify their creations (and to classify 
> materials that are not electronic or have not been classified). And we would need authoring tools 
> to facilitate insertion of the appropriate mark up.
> 
> It's a big job but we need some method of doing this. And it would be easier if we all did it 
> together. I'm not suggesting that we classify all the private and personal home pages or pages 
> like the Lesbian Barbie home page (what's the LCC for that?!), maybe only sites that publish 
> "quality" information need be classified and the rest can be left to search engines like Yahoo 
> etc etc.

I think the question of "what kind of pages to list" would be a big one 
here.  Letting users classify their own pages will pretty much defeat the 
purpose of having an organized list.  More and more commercial entities 
are coming on to the web now; they see it as a new form of advertising 
and business promotion.  If you let them categorize themselves, your 
catalog would be a mess...  

At Yahoo!, we do ask users to suggest a category 
when submitting sites.  This helps us to organize the huge amount of 
submissions we receive (it's easier and more efficient to work with a lot of 
things in one area for a while than to constantly skip around the whole 
hierarchy).  However, these suggestions are just that -- a cataloger needs 
to look at the site to make sure it's in the right place.  Sometimes 
users just don't know about a more appropriate category; sometimes their 
idea of what belongs in a category is a little skewed.  (I like the Texas 
Beef Council example: they submitted to Health/Fitness.)  One trend we 
see here is that people often don't get specific enough.  For example, a 
site about the US Civil War would go in Arts/Humanities/History/American 
History/19th Century/Civil War, but the user might submit the site to 
just Arts/Humanities/History.  If users were self-classifying their 
sites, we would have a big clump of all sorts of things at these higher 
levels, defeating the purpose of having subcategories to organize them.

Anyway, just my two cents...

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Anne Callery                  Yahoo!                 anne at yahoo.com
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