Virtually everyone who has used the Web has heard of Yahoo!, though few know the secret of pronouncing it correctly. It is the starting point of choice for many veteran Web cruisers that want a powerful search engine, a well-designed subject tree, and extensive coverage. Now that Yahoo has access to more resources than two graduate students in a computer lab, the service is adding hundreds of new sites every day and may well fulfill their stated mission: "To be the world's best guide for information and online discovery." Yahoo currently has about 100,000 sites categorized and searchable via a fast, flexible, and option-rich keyword search engine. Webmasters check the links periodically to make sure they are still functional, a distinct advantage of this service over the spiders and other automatic indexing tools.
The subject headings used to organize the page may not be Library of Congress, but they seem to work well for the subject matter covered here. This entire web is a model of good organizational design, both visually and structurally. Each page provides access to all the links one might need such as Search, Add URL, or from other pages, Search, Up, Suggest, and Help. Links to subheadings are easy to identify and logical. Particularly thoughtful touches are the direct links to other major search engines such as Lycos and InfoSeek right on the Yahoo search entry form page, which now automatically execute your current search on the search engine you choose.
One drawback, however, to the current structure is that it is starting to reach the limits of its scalability. I subscribe to the three click rule in evaluating Web sites. If you need more than three clicks to get to useful content, then it's buried too deep. Their search engine makes up for some of the problem here. When the number of links gets large enough, I fear they will be forced to reinvent the Library of Congress Subject Heading system if someone doesn't point out its existence to them beforehand. The headings are, however, very useful as a means of understanding the context of the links found in a keyword search and for finding similar links.
What keeps most searchers coming back to this page is the fast and convenient search engine. Yahoo is one of the few Internet directories that actually explains their philosophy of cataloging. Incidentally, Yahoo employs several catalogers and at least one trained librarian. Titles, comments (pagemaker's descriptions of the content), and URLs are indexed and the user can choose which will be searched. Results are delivered in the form of often well-described links (the page authors supply the description, which is then sometimes edited by Yahoo staff) accompanied by a clickable subject heading, so that one can find related sources with a single click. The keyword chosen is bolded for easy identification. The fact that the site's description is normally supplied by the pagemaker makes this a far more useful source than many of the spiders which try to generate a page description automatically, which can lead to bizarre results. The consistency of this site is remarkable - I have used Yahoo on an almost daily basis since it opened and have never experienced the "too many connections - try back later" message that many automated services rely on. The site also makes a diligent effort to keep users up-to-date on what's new with the service, both in the form of a "New" graphic displayed next to sites added less than three days ago, as well as through the "Weekly Picks" link and the "Web Launch" link that parades recently launched pages.
Some will no doubt be annoyed by the advertisements from corporate sponsors, but the alternative is unthinkable for those of us who have grown to depend on Yahoo.
Open Text
Lycos
WebCrawler
Yahoo's philosophy of cataloging