[WEB4LIB] Terminology problem

[Michael Sauers]

A Search Engines in and automated index of words on web pages.

A Directory is a human-generated categorized listing of sites.

AltaVista and Google are search engines.

Yahoo and FindLaw are Directories.

The other term you may be looking for is "Portal" which is a site that
wants to be your home page; a site that wants to be all things to all
people offrering more than just searching but also e-mail, chat, shopping,
stock quotes, news, weather &tc. (Usually also has a personalization
feature.)

Both AltaVista and Yahoo are also portals, but Google is not. (Just take a
glance at them and you'll see ther differences immediately.)

Michael Sauers					         msauers at bcr.org
Internet Trainer	 	      (personal) www.webpan.com/msauers/
Bibliographic Center for Research (BCR)	(business) www.bcr.org/~msauers/
     All opinions expressed are just my own unless otherwise noted.