I stumbled across a great post about the importance of using both cold searching and warm, cuddly, user-generated content.
I totally agree. I love Yahoo! for keeping up its editorially-built directory. I think the Next Big Thing might be a Wiki Directory, with fewer bars to entry than Zeal or ODP - where anyone can submit a site and the problems of spam are solved, somehow.
My favorite quote from the post:
Recently I had a request where the person needed a list of vendors in a particular niche IT area. There was NOTHING available through the traditional sources I'd go to - OneSource, Hoover's, the market research firms or even MarketResearch.com. So what was left?
That's right - directory listings. I found two great directories through Yahoo! and through DMOZ (remember DMOZ? Wow, that seems old), which provided me 85% of the companies I needed to know about, and provided leads to the next 10%.
I've asked the hypothetical question before: could I have just conducted a search for this and found it? No way - my search NEVER would have turned up even 50% of the companies I found using these relatively authoritative directories.
posted by Alice @ 8:45 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I agree with the quote, but wonder why the author is so sure that search wouldn't have turned up the same companies.
-chrisf
You really can't get all of those businesses on one page, no matter how you search. I've tried the same thing with nonprofits - it takes a long time to find something like all the domestic violence shelters in California, because their PageRank tends to be low and their webmasters tend to not know how to use the metadata to their advantage. A search for "california domestic violence shelters" on search engines brings up a mix of articles, metasites, and law firms along with some actual shelters.
You can get a lot closer using DMOZ or Yahoo!
Alice, something like www.AboutUs.org?
Or doesn't that fit what you where thinking?
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