Yahoo!

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While Lycos is purely a search engine, Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) is the opposite: it's purely a Web directory. (The other sites we'll look at later in this article are combinations of the two.)

The main feature of Yahoo! is the categories list. You click on a category, and then on a subcategory, and so on, until you arrive at the topic you're interested in. You may find some other topics along the way too that you hadn't even thought of!

For those who don't have time to wade through categories, Yahoo! provides a text box where you can enter the keywords you're searching for, but it searches only its own small directory of sites. Yahoo! doesn't even attempt to maintain a master index of the whole Web. But on the plus side, the sites that Yahoo! does list are generally the "good" ones. Yahoo! is helpful when you're looking for quality rather than quantity in a search.

Whether you choose to use the categories or the keywords depends on why you are looking up a particular topic. For example, suppose that I'm interested in any magazines for small businesses owners. Because I'm looking for a broad area of knowledge, and don't know the names of the magazines, Yahoo!'s categories would be best. I would take the following path through them:
Business and Economy --> Small Business Information --> Magazines

Such a search brought me the names of 16 magazines..

But suppose that I want all the information I can find about Shetland Sheepdogs from Yahoo!. I know that it will probably be scattered in several categories, because Shetland Sheepdog breeding is a business for some and a hobby for others, and pet ownership is a separate hobby too, and animal care is separate from any of those. This would be a good time to use Yahoo!'s keyword search. So I enter Shetland Sheepdog in the text box to get the results.

Notice that Yahoo! found sites in three categories: two for breeders and one for the breed itself. It found a total of only 15 matches, so obviously we aren't getting the same quantity of hits that we do with a real search engine. Yahoo!, however, has a built-in link with one of the better search engine sites: AltaVista. At the bottom of your Yahoo! search results, you'll find an AltaVista link. Clicking on it will take you to the AltaVista search results for the same keywords that you entered in Yahoo!.