Press Release: For Immediate Publication.
655 W Baker K111
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
bryanfdn@virtuallyfree.com
http://virtuallyfree.com
1996 - THE YEAR INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES DIED!
"Just as the rapid growth of the Web has outstripped
the ability of software to search the Web, the rapid growth of the Web has outstripped the abilities of humans to categorize the Web," said Kevin Brown, director of marketing at Inktomi.
Search engines are out! Subject Specific or Niche directories are in!
How would you act if you were asked to dig through your 100,000,000 files a million times a day, directed to search with only one, two, or
three words, and present the best ten or twenty that a researcher would be interested in?...Not!
On top of the problem the Search Engines are having, their brother robots are being asked to roam the Web, some with very little direction, and capture all of the millions of changes that are occurring daily...Not!
And to add to all of this, the user - that’s you and me - is supposed to be either a Techie or an Educator, fully schooled in the art of boolean string search techniques with refine and re-refine capabilities...Not!
As the web grows at a phenomenal pace on a worldwide basis, thousands of newbies join the fray every day -- newbies who haven’t even stopped off at a web "how-to" library. The new black boxes, such as WebTV, are introducing a whole new group of users to the web who don’t want to spend as much time in learning search engine techniques as the "old timers" did in "95-96", for sure!
Enter the subject specific or niche directory. By our count there are at least 400 of these directories available. Many of them deal with
only one subject. Some directories, such as ours, which you can view @ http://virtuallyfree.com/ is not only subject specific, but also
business specific. We offer 30 sites in two categories. The first section is "where-to", with over 2,500 URLs to list your business with. The second section is "how-to", with over 2,500 sites that will show you how others are doing business on the web.
VirtuallyFree’s current "where-to" subjects are: Links for all, RECIPROCAL LINKS DIRECTORY - , Directories, Classifieds Free, Classifieds Free/pay, Pay
Classifieds, Yellow pages, Search Engines, Search Resources, Press Releases, and Monthly Updates.
The "how-to" subjects are: Accounting, Advertising, Automotive, Business-to-Business, Business Opportunities, Classifieds, Computer,
Dental/Dentists, Home Page Design/Graphics, Import/Export, Investment/Finance, Law, Medical/Doctor, Press, Real Estate, Resources,
Restaurant, Retail, Schools, Stress Management, Writing/Writers and Monthly Updates.
Many of our categories offer more "make sense" URLs, than the mighty Search Engines; some categories offer as many as 400 URLs.
All in all, they represent hundreds of thousands of web sites with millions of pages in subject specific fashion.
"In the last year, general search sites have largely abandoned efforts to catalog the entire Net. Attempting instead to create directories of
sites and ancillary services to help users get good information. For example, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and Yahoo now offer
such extras as returning suggested keywords to add to your query, providing links to related company info and news headlines. And
even linking to popular Web commerce sites such as Amazon.com and CD Now. These attempts to predict the users search intentions
are only on target occasionally and are sometimes distracting."
AUGUST 1998 UPDATE
JANUARY 2000 UPDATE
JANUARY 2001 UPDATE
JANUARY 2002 UPDATE
JANUARY 2002 UPDATE
My oh my!
1996-2002©
First posted in November 1996 with 1997, 1998, and 2000 additions.
November 1997 UPDATE
Jesse Burst's Anchor Desk @ ZD net/PC Magazine
Search Sites Shocking Secret - (Resource)
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2432.html
We separated the directories into two individual ones, VirtuallyFree and Adfree, in order to present a clearer picture to searchers. We also created a separate website for CelebrityBusinessNews.com. In late 1999 Yahoo, the largest directory on the web, began charging $200 to look at your posting to their directory. By mid 2,000 3 more search engine/directories had followed suit, Looksmart, MSN and GOTO.
AltaVista joins the $200 dollar club and it is rumored that the remaining 3 of the top eight eight will go early this year.
It took five years but several of the major players of the past are finally biting the bullet and changing from their 'free' status to 'pay' or goto ... The biggest surprizes so far this year are AltaVista not indexing submissions, even the paid ones and Excite going to a meta-search concept with no data base of it's own. LookSmart is questionable according to one major tech newsletter and even some of the smaller ones are giving up.
Yahoo, still struggling for a profit has decided to not only charge $299 for posting evaluation but is making the fee an annual event. $299 per year and no guarantee you will be in the top 30 search returns? Go figure!