The Google Directory is no more. So, what does this mean? What was the Google Directory? You’d recognize right away if you saw it. The directory was the list of categories under the Google Search spot on the Google page. Take a look and you’ll see a cleaner look to that Google page. Basically, all you have now is the search option.
I want to take a quick look at directories and search. Years ago I worked on an intranet project for major corporation and we faced a challenge with how best to tackle the problem of getting the right information to the right person. There are two ways people look for information on the web. One is using a search engine, like Google search. The other is by using a list of topics and narrowing their selection down as the go through the topics. So, if you start with Recreation, you’d then find topics such as fishing, hiking or sports. From there, you’d find more options to narrow your topic choices as well as some of the top sites for that topic. In the early days, most of the web was navigated through directories, but as search engines became more powerful, people began to prefer the search method. But the directories were still there as an underlying structure.
But now Google has completely done away with the Google directory as a way to find information. If you visit the Google directory, you’ll find a message telling you that Search is the fastest way to find the information you need, but they also have a link directing you to the Open Directory Project (ODP) at dmoz.org. So, for those who really want to use a Directory to find information on the web or who want to have their pages listed on a directory, there’s still a directory available. And now people are wondering what this means.
One train of thought is that the Google team no longer sees value in the directory. I suspect that may be part of the answer. When I worked on the corporate “search vs. directory” project, the search proponents struggled to understand why they needed to put an effort of keeping up with directory listings. To them search was the way to go. And with Google promoting Google Chrome where the web browser itself functions as a search engine, they probably see even less value in maintaining that directory that they did two or three years ago. Certainly the quiet discontinuation of the directory indicates that Google feels that the usage is low enough that there won’t be much protest.
But does that mean that they really are dropping the value of the directory or have they decided to refer to the DMOZ open directory project as the best source for directory information?