Is Yahoo! still useful?

[Charles P. Hobbs]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Walter Minkel wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, CMUNSON wrote:
> 
> >      Yahoo! has been one of the premiere web directories for several years, 
> >      but I'm beginning to wonder if it's really up-to-date. Does anyone 
> >      know of any articles or studies on Yahoo! or its content? 
> 
> I only know my own experiences, & I'm becoming more & more disappointed
> with Yahoo. I search for & compile web sites with information content for
> K-12 students, & I've just about given up on Yahoo for worthwhile stuff.
> Nowadays, whenever I do a Yahoo search, it seems to come up with an
> overwhelming number of commercial sites and a lot of dead links.
> Yahooligans is even worse. It seems to be almost _all_ commercial sites
> these days. I'm using mostly MetaCrawler & HotBot to find the good stuff.


I tend to think that Yahoo is just overwhelmed with people requesting to
be
listed there, and they can't keep up. . .(It took me several months to get
a site listed there).

This also means that they can't keep up with the links that they do have;
therefore the dead links (although in all fairness, this happens with
other
search engines/directories, all the time. . .)

As for the overabundance of commercial sites on Yahoo (I haven't checked 
this out for myself, btw) . . .think about it. . .they're usually the most
agressive in wanting to be listed, for obvious reasons. And if Yahoo is
swamped with people wanting to get on, and is falling behind, there's 
not that much motivation for them to actively search the net looking for
stuff to include . . .

As for more "library-oriented" Internet directories, there's
BUBL LINK (http://bubl.ac.uk/link/) and Internet Public Library
(http://www.ipl.org), which attempt to apply varying aspects of the
"library" metaphor to a portion of the World Wide Web. However, it still
requires continual effort to keep these useful (e.g. no dead links, etc.)