The Librarians Index to the Internet
This is a review of the Librarians Index to the Internet. The site has an interesting history. A librarian started it in 1990 as a bunch of bookmarks on a Gopher (a system that pre-dates the Web for organizing and displaying files on Internet servers. A Gopher server would present its contents as a hierarchically structured list of files. With the ascendance of the Web, most Gopher databases are being converted to Web sites which can be more easily accessed via Web search engines) sever. The site then was integrated into the Berkeley Public Library Index to the Internet, then into the current website.
The appearance of the site is not very attractive. It uses a reddish brown color for the links, which are hard to read. The layout reminds me of Yahoo. It has a bunch of topics that are on the main page. The subjects run the gambit from religion to the Arts. I started looking at the links using my favorite subject, automobiles. This link brought me to a second page that again listed a bunch of links. I clicked on theft and it brought me to a page that listed two additional links. Instead of being indexes, these were actual websites that had numbers listed next to them. The numbers are there to indicate that this site is a "best of" site. It means that the site listed has been screened and is going to give you the exact information that you are looking for.
I was impressed with the information that was included on the website link page. It told me when the page was created, who created it, and when it was last updated. It can make searching easier if you have a general subject that you are interested in. It goes from very broad topics and will drill down until you are at the specific topic that you want information. This is when you will get the list of webpages. It does not link you too four or five thousand pages, usually less than a hundred, depending on the subject.
This website should not be used as a general search engine like Google or Hotbot. It only indexes about ten thousand of the hundreds of millions of websites out there. It is useful for targeted searches. I struck out with many of the search sentences that I used. The site offers an advanced search that allows you to use Boolean statements (and,or,not) in your search. I typed in Lucent Technologies, which is the company that I work for, and it returned a link for Bell Laboratories.
The help section was useful. If the words that you typed in did not return a link, it would automatically bring up the help page. This was good because it showed a variety of different ways that you could search for the topic you were looking for. I wish that they had the capability to help with spelling. This is the main reason why I use Google as my primary search engine. I am terrible at spelling. It also had a link from the main page called "best search tools". This linked to a page that had a group of popular search engines like Google and Altavista. It also had a link to Metacrawler, which allows you to search multiple search engines at one time.
I would not say that this website is unique. It is similar to other catalog sites. It did grow on me after a while. You have to be patient with the lack of ability of the search function, especially if you are used to having thousands of pages returned to you. I will use this site again. I found it useful for research in my job. I write technical material all day and it is often frustrating to get too much information thrown at you all at once. This site pared down the information and only gives you the good stuff.