[BusinessTeam] Web Directory

Message-ID: <6B75EF096AE0BE428B8CEDEA89C5F6327832DF@exchange01.lab49.com> · Tue Oct 24 14:23:26 2000 UTC

HotLinks Invites You to Help Build a Web Directory

Surfers save bookmarks and feed the Web's latest search tool, the HotLinks
Guide.

Tom Mainelli, PCWorld.com
Friday, October 20, 2000

Big-shot Web directories such as Yahoo <http://www.yahoo.com/>  and
LookSmart <http://www.looksmart.com/>  don't offer all the best sites on
the Web, but the HotLinks Guide, <http://www.hotlinks.com/guide>  based on
recommendations from thousands of regular people, claims to do just that. 

Thousands of the most popular links are missing from the big directories,
says Jonathan Abrams, the company's founder and chief technology officer.
HotLinks recently researched its competitors' coverage, checking some of
the top directories for 13,000 of the most popular links in the HotLinks
Guide.

Yahoo fared the best during the HotLinks-administered test, offering up 61
percent of the 13,000 links. Netscape's Open Directory Project
<http://search.netscape.com/>  covered 54 percent; and LookSmart nailed 50
percent. Snap.com <http://www.snap.com/>  listed just 34 percent. The test
shows even the best directories out there are bypassing some of our
favorite sites, Abrams says.

Human vs. Machine?

Most companies overlook links because they take only two approaches to
covering the Web, Abrams says. Search engines such as Google
<http://www.google.com/>  use programs that locate millions of sites, but
they can't organize them very well, he says. Directories such as Yahoo
hire staff to review and catalog the Web (the Open Directory Project uses
volunteers). But asking a few hundred people to catalog the rapidly
expanding Web isn't practical, and eventually it won't even be possible,
he says. "It's not a scalable model, and it's not a very Internet-like
model," he says.

The HotLinks Guide relies on real Web users, Abrams says. In September of
1999 the company launched a Web-based bookmark service that lets people
store private or shared Web site listings (see "Share Links
<http://www.pcworld.com/news/article.asp?aid=13067> List With Strangers"
).

Today HotLinks has more than 500,000 customers, and the HotLinks Guide
aggregates the favorite Web sites of all of them, Abrams says. People
essentially vote for the best Web sites by saving them as bookmarks, he
says. It's similar to the sharing approach taken by Backflip, which
invites you to store your bookmarks online if you'll share them (see "Try
a Backflip  <http://www.pcworld.com/news/article.asp?aid=14055> Instead of
a Search" ).

The company's software sorts through these "reviewed" sites, assigning
relevance to sites according to the number of times they appear in the
database. Currently the HotLinks database contains about 30 million URLs,
and it has aggregated about 100,000 of them into the HotLinks Guide, he
says. 

And Room to Grow

HotLinks is just getting started, Abrams says. "Our directory isn't very
old, it will take time to scale," he says. So as the Web grows, and other
directories fall behind, the HotLinks database and then the Guide will
grow correspondingly, he says. 

The HotLinks Guide will always be smaller than the overall database,
Abrams adds. If you don't find what you seek in the directory, you can
search the full database. The company doesn't plan to aggregate all of the
URLs it collects.

"We filter out the noise," he says. "A lot of people have dumb stuff in
their bookmarks."

Luke Flemmer
VP Strategic Ventures
nano
phone: (212) 402-7870
fax:      (212) 430-6374
www.nano.com <http://www.nano.com/> 