Appendix C: Web Directories, Search Engines, and Portals

Once you have gotten online and can send E-mail, the next question is, "Who do I send E-mail to?" After all, there's no point in being able to send messages to anywhere in the world if you don't know anybody's address.

Fortunately, fairly early on in the development of the web, people realised the need to make it easy to find the myriads of resources which were coming online. At first, people would simply put links to the resources they knew about on their own web sites. In fact, to this day, you will see "Links" pages on most web sites (including the CAMsoc web site.)

Another popular way of listing resources is to create a directory. In a directory, links are divided into categories, so that users can browse through the categories, looking for the kind of sites which interest them. Directories are useful when you are simply "browsing." In other words, if you do not have a particular site or organisation in mind, but simply looking at the categories to see if anything sparks your interest. (Earlier editions of the CTT had a directory of Christian organisations in Appendix C, but it soon became too large to maintain properly.)

Then, somebody came up with the idea of creating a search engine. Instead of manually dividing up web sites into categories (which is time-consuming, and sometimes misleading, as a web site might not fit particularly well into any existing category), the idea is to create an index of all the words used in every web site, and then allow people to search for all the web sites which contain a given word or phrase. The concept is the same as an index in a book, or a concordance of the Bible, except that instead of indexing a single work, search engines try to index the entire web.

Of course, with all the millions of web sites in the world, there may be thousands, or even millions, of web pages which contain the words you are looking for. Each search engine uses a different method to rank the results they come up with, trying to give you the results you are most interested in first. Thus, there are a few tricks you can use to give the search engine more hints in sorting the results. One is to use lots of search terms. If, for example, you are looking for the CAMsoc web site, you could try a search term of "computers", but then there would be millions of pages coming up, and who knows how many pages of hits you'd have to look through before you found what you were looking for? But if you add more words, you give more hints to the seach engine for ranking your "hits." (There would be more hits, but the ones you were most interested would be more likely to come first.) Thus, searching on terms like "computers christianity church bible bbs users group" will be more likely to bring up the CAMsoc page early. (Okay, I admit that I just kept on adding terms to an Alta Vista search until the CAMsoc site appeared on the first page of hits.) Some search engines allow you to make your search even more explicit by putting a plus sign in front of the words which must appear on the page you are looking for (for instance, if you want to find Bible programs for your Macintosh, you could try searching with an expression like "+Bible +Macintosh software"), or a minus sign in front of words which you don't want to appear (for instance, if you want to find out about virus which affect people, not computer viruses, you could try searching with an expression like "virus -computer".) You can also do things like putting phrases you want to match exactly into quotation marks. (If you entered your name as a search term, then you would get thousands of hits, including every page mentioning anybody with either your first of your last name. But if you put your name in quotation marks, then you would only find those pages which refer to both your first and your last name, which might mean you find yourself, or that you find a namesake, which is fun, too.) Other search engines (like AskJeeves) are designed to answer questions that you ask in natural language. (For example, "Are there any Christian computer user groups?")

Finally, since most of the big resource sites on the Internet are driven by advertising, people realised that, rather than bringing you in once, telling you how to find another site, and sending you off again, they could show you more ads (and make more money) by encouraging you to browse around their site for a while. Thus, besides directories and search engines, they started to add news, weather, shopping, comics, and other features, in order to get you to spend more timer on their site. These sites are called "portals", because their goal is to have you set them as your home page, so that every time you access the Internet, you start with them. In effect, if you use a portal, it becomes your Internet "front door." A good portal will give you the features you want (news, weather, sports, comics, etc.), but allow you to turn off the features you don't want (horoscopes, for example.) In effect, portals are becoming the new newspapers, keeping people in touch with what's going on, and incidentally selling a few things along the way.

The lines between the different sites are blurry. As a link page gets bigger, it can develop into a directory. As a directory adds search capability, it can develop into a search engine. As a search engine adds features, it can develop into a portal. Which one is right for you depends on what you need. If you just want to browse and see what's interesting, a good directory can be lots of fun. If you are looking for something specific, and are in a hurry, a search engine can usually turn something up once you know the tricks.

There are some resources which don't quite fall so neatly into the other categories. The Active Spidering Search Engine keeps track of the Top 100 Christian search engines, as measured by the number of times each is accessed from it. ChristianPortals.com maintains lists of Christian directories, search engines, portals, and link lists. The Christian WebWatcher is not a directory, although it does have a list of links to Christian web sites. Instead of being sorted by topic, the links are sorted by the last time they were updated. (Note: The updates must be reported to the WebWatcher by the site's webmaster, so the listing is not exhaustive by any means, but it does make for a different perspective on looking for sites.) SpamCop is an insanely useful site. Once you have been online for a while, people are likely to collect your E-mail address and start sending you "junk E-mail", trying to sell you all kinds of rubbish. By using SpamCop, you can complain to their ISP, and have their accounts shut down. (Sending Spam is not illegal – yet – but it violates Internet "netiquette" and the terms of use agreements for most ISPs.)

Christian Directories
General Directories
Christian Search Engines
General Search Engines
Christian Portals
General Portals
Other Resources

Appendix C: Web Directories, Search Engines, and Portals

Christian Directories

General Directories

Christian Search Engines

General Search Engines

Christian Portals

General Portals

Other Resources