Search Engines

In class we learned about the differences between directories and search engines. Directories produce more relelvant hits that search engines do because they are edited by humans, rather than Spiders. Because of the fact that directories are edited by humans, the resultes yielded may be biased. They may also lead to dead links. Search engines are also biased, though, in the rankings. Rankings are developed by payment, number of clicks, and location of keywords rather than the quality of the information.
Learning about directories was completely new to me. I am only familiar with search engines, like google, and I use google to do a lot of my research. I have experienced some of the down sides of google in that it is sometimes difficult to form the right combination of words to find the correct search. Often, search engines will be miss led to the incorrect search by the wording of the keywords.