In This Chapter

Google indexes billions of web pages in its search database. That’s both good and bad. The huge volume of pages virtually guarantees that you’ll find something useful, but all that volume sometimes makes it difficult to separate that one useful page from the thousands (or millions) of less-useful ones. It’s kind of a needle-in-a-haystack problem.

By indexing literally billions of web pages, the Google search engine employs a brute-force approach. You get plenty of quantity, but the quality of results isn’t always up to par.

When the quality of results matters, it’s sometimes better to view a list of pages that have been personally selected for their content and appropriateness (as opposed to letting the GoogleBot and PageRank Algorithm do the gathering and selecting for you). So if it’s handpicked results you want, you want a web directory, not an automated search engine.

Not surprisingly, Google offers just this type of human-edited directory—called, also not surprisingly, the Google Directory. And that’s not the only human-edited information available from Google; Google also offers a host of articles written by human experts, in the guise of what it calls Google Knol.