Last Tuesday morning I spent forty-five minutes clicking through NetNest's Technology directory. By the time I closed my browser I had bookmarked six sites I never would have found through a search engine — that is the quiet power of a hand-curated link list.
The Directory Advantage
Search engines measure relevance by algorithm — keyword density, meta tags, inbound link counts. A human editor measures relevance by visiting a site and asking one question: is this worth a stranger's time? I have been editing the NetNest Software section since March, and every entry has been tested in a text browser and described by hand.
A directory entry written by someone who visited your homepage tells a visitor something no algorithm can — that a human being thought this page was worth recommending.
When we first published the directory in early 1994, it was just a shared bookmark file between four editors. Today we maintain over twelve thousand entries across two hundred categories, each one reviewed by a person. Crawlers will always be faster, but speed was never the point — judgment was.