Academic and Professional Directories and Web Academic and professional directories are created by librarians or subject experts and tend to be associated with libraries and academic institutions. These collections are created in order to enhance the research process and help users find high quality sites of interest. A careful selection process is applied, and links to the selected resources are usually annotated. These collections are often created to serve an institution's constituency but may be useful to any researcher. As a rule, these sites do not generate income or carry advertising.
Commercial portals are created to generate income and serve the general public. These services contain directories that link to a wide range of topics and often emphasize entertainment, commerce, hobbies, sports, travel and other interests not necessarily covered by academic directories. These sites seek to draw traffic in order to support advertising. As a part of this goal, the directory is offered in conjunction with a number of additional customer services.
The lines between directories, search engines and the deep Web are blurring. The deep Web is often represented by searchable news, phone books, dictionaries, maps, stock quotes, items in retail stores, multimedia files, etc. Directories are also present at some search engine sites, and sometimes their contents are searched along with content from the general Web. General Websites Search Engine by 101topranking.com |
