{"id":29126,"date":"2026-05-21T02:28:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T07:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/?p=29126"},"modified":"2026-05-21T02:37:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T07:37:38","slug":"how-web-directories-organize-and-categorize-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/how-web-directories-organize-and-categorize-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"How Web Directories Organize and Categorize the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"

The previous articles in this series defined the web directory and set it against the search engine. This one examines the part of the directory that is easiest to take for granted and hardest to do well: the work of organizing and categorizing \u2014 of deciding what goes where. A directory is, in the end, a classification<\/a> imposed on the web, and a classification is a far more difficult and more interesting object than it first appears. This article explains how directories<\/a> structure their contents, why placing a website into a category is genuinely hard rather than merely tedious, and what the two main approaches to the problem \u2014 the hierarchical and the faceted \u2014 each offer.<\/p>\n

The claims here about how categories behave, and about the difficulty of classification, are drawn from peer-reviewed research in cognitive psychology and information science, cited by author and year and listed at the end.<\/p>\n

The directory as an act of classification<\/h2>\n

To organize a directory is to make a claim about how a domain is divided. Before any website is placed, the directory’s designers must decide what the top-level categories<\/a> are, how those divide into subcategories, and how deep the divisions run \u2014 and every one of those decisions is a theory of the subject rather than a neutral fact about it. A directory that opens with the categories “arts, business, health<\/a>, science” has asserted that those four headings carve its territory usefully; a different set of headings would carve it differently, and would send the same website to a different place. This is the first thing to grasp about how directories organize the web<\/a>: the structure is not discovered, it is authored. A classification is an argument about a domain, and the quality of a directory<\/a> depends on the quality of that argument quite as much as on the sites it eventually contains.<\/p>\n

One consequence of this follows immediately and is easy to miss. If the structure is authored, then it can be authored well or badly, and the difference is not a matter of taste but of how much work the structure does for the user. A good classification carves a domain at joints that correspond to how its users actually think about it, so that the choice presented at each level is one the user can recognize and make; a poor classification carves the same domain at headings that made sense only to its author, and leaves the user guessing at every branch. Two directories may contain the very same websites<\/a> and yet differ greatly in worth, because one has been thought through and the other merely assembled. This is also why a classification cannot be borrowed wholesale from one domain and imposed on another, and why the structure of a directory must be designed<\/a> for the particular subject and the particular audience it serves. The categories that would organize a directory<\/a> of legal services well would organize a directory of craft suppliers badly, even though the act of classification is the same in both. The lesson, which the rest of this article develops, is that the structure deserves at least as much editorial care as the entries do, and arguably more, since an entry in the wrong place is a single mistake, whereas a category drawn wrongly misplaces everything that will ever be filed beneath it.<\/p>\n

The lineage of classification: from the library to the web<\/h2>\n

The web directory did not invent the problem of arranging a large body of material by subject, and a reader who sees the directory’s classification as a recent or a merely technical<\/a> contrivance will misjudge it. The work belongs to a tradition centuries deep, that of the library, and the difficulties the directory meets are difficulties the library met first. A library faces, in its own form, exactly the directory’s task: a vast and growing collection of items, each of them about something, must be arranged so that a person who knows only a subject can find what is relevant to it. The systems libraries built to do this \u2014 of which the Dewey Decimal Classification, devised in the 1870s, is the most widely known \u2014 are hierarchies of subject very much like a directory’s: a small number of broad classes, each divided and subdivided until the headings are specific enough to be useful.<\/p>\n

One strand of that tradition bears directly on a distinction this article will draw later, and deserves naming here. In the early twentieth century the Indian librarian S. R. Ranganathan argued that the strict single hierarchy, in which every item receives one and only one place, was inadequate to the real complexity of subjects, and proposed instead what became known as faceted classification: the description of an item along several independent dimensions at once, rather than its assignment to a single slot. The argument was made about books<\/a> and library shelves decades before the web existed, and yet it describes, with some precision, the choice a web directory faces between a rigid tree and a more flexible scheme \u2014 a choice examined in detail below. The point worth carrying forward is one of intellectual humility. The directory’s designers are not improvising. They are the latest practitioners of knowledge organization, an old and serious discipline, and the problems that make their task hard are not flaws in a young technology but the permanent problems of classification, which the library tradition has been describing, and only partly solving, for a very long time.<\/p>\n

It would be wrong, even so, to treat the directory’s task as simply the library’s task moved online, because two differences make the directory’s version harder. The library classifies a collection that grows slowly and that it physically controls; the web directory classifies a collection that grows explosively and that it does not control at all, and that therefore changes underneath it. And the items a library classifies do not, on the whole, have an interest in where they are placed, whereas the owner of a website very often does, and may describe a site tendentiously in the hope of a more flattering or more prominent category. The directory inherits the library’s intellectual problem and then has it sharpened by scale, by speed, and by the self-interest of the very sites it is attempting to file.<\/p>\n

The shape of the hierarchy<\/h2>\n

The classical web directory expresses its classification as a hierarchy \u2014 a tree. A single general root divides into broad subject categories; each of those divides into narrower subcategories; and the division continues until the categories are specific enough that listing individual websites<\/a> within them is useful. A user reaches a site by descending this tree, moving at each step from the more general to the more particular, and the structure’s promise is that any site has one proper place and that a patient user can find it by making, at each level, a single sensible choice.<\/p>\n

The promise is harder to keep than it looks, and the difficulty has two distinct sources, both worth examining, because together they explain most of what is awkward about real directories. The first concerns the categories themselves: the boundaries between them are rarely as clean as a tree diagram suggests. The second concerns the websites: many of them have a legitimate claim to more than one place in the tree. The next two sections take these in turn.<\/p>\n

Why categorizing a website is genuinely hard<\/h2>\n

Categories with fuzzy edges<\/h3>\n

A hierarchy presents its categories as if they were sharp-edged containers, each website either inside a category or outside it. Research on how categories actually work suggests this is not how categories behave, even in the mind. Rosch and Mervis (1975), in foundational work in cognitive psychology, showed that ordinary categories do not have neat defining boundaries but are organized instead around clear central examples, with membership shading off gradually toward the edges \u2014 a robin is an unequivocal bird, a penguin a more marginal one, and the category “bird” has no crisp border so much as a centre and a fading periphery. Categories of website behave the same way. A directory category such as “online marketing<\/a>” has obvious central members and a wide, blurred margin of sites that are partly about marketing and partly about something else, and an editor placing those marginal sites is not reading off a fact but making a judgement. The fuzziness is not a flaw in any particular directory; it is a property of categorization itself, and a directory’s hierarchy papers over it by drawing borders that the underlying reality does not actually have.<\/p>\n

Sites that belong in several places<\/h3>\n

The second difficulty is multiple membership. A strict hierarchy gives each site one location, but a great many websites have a genuine and roughly equal claim to several. A site that builds scheduling software for dental practices belongs, with equal justice, under software, under healthcare, and under business services; a magazine about cycling holidays<\/a> belongs under sport, under travel, and under publishing. There is no fact of the matter that settles where it “really” goes, and the editor must either choose one branch and accept that users arriving by the others will miss the site, or list it in several places and accept the duplication and the maintenance cost that follow. Every hierarchical directory copes with this, and none of them solves it, because the problem is not a defect of execution but a mismatch between the one-path structure of a tree and the many-sided nature of what is being filed.<\/p>\n

\n\n \n \n <\/path>\n <\/marker>\n <\/defs>\n <\/rect>\n <\/rect>\n One website<\/text>\n dental scheduling app<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Business \u203a Software<\/a> & tools<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Health<\/a> \u203a Practice management<\/text>\n <\/rect>\n Technology \u203a Web services<\/text>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n <\/line>\n a single site can have an equal claim to several categories at once<\/text>\n<\/svg>
Figure 1.<\/strong> The problem of multiple membership. A single website \u2014 here, a scheduling application for dental practices \u2014 has a reasonable and roughly equal claim to several categories. A strict hierarchy forces a choice; a faceted scheme, discussed below, does not.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Granularity: how broad, how deep<\/h3>\n

To the two difficulties already described \u2014 categories with fuzzy edges, and sites that belong in several places \u2014 a third should be added, because it troubles every directory and is less often named. It is the question of granularity: how broad each category should be, and how deep the hierarchy should run. The question has no general answer, and both of the obvious mistakes are genuinely damaging. A category drawn too broadly \u2014 “business”, standing alone, with thousands of sites beneath it \u2014 fails the user, because a heading that contains almost everything discriminates almost nothing, and the user who arrives at it is scarcely better off than before. A category drawn too narrowly fails differently: a hierarchy subdivided into very fine headings places each site precisely, but it also forces the user down a long series of choices to reach anything, and at each step it presents a decision the user may not have the knowledge to make. Worse, a very fine subcategory may hold only one or two sites, or none at all, leaving the user who navigated the whole way to it with the distinct sense of having been led to an empty room.<\/p>\n

The editor of a directory is therefore always negotiating between breadth and depth, and the negotiation cannot be settled once and then applied everywhere, because subjects are not uniformly dense. A field in which the web<\/a> is rich may need to be divided finely to remain useful, while a thinly covered field is better left broad, and the same directory may therefore run deep in one branch and shallow in another without any inconsistency at all. Granularity, in short, is not a setting but a continuous editorial<\/a> judgement, and it is one of the clearest illustrations of this article’s running theme: that a directory’s structure is authored, and that the authoring is difficult in ways that have nothing to do with how many sites the directory finally contains.<\/p>\n

Hierarchical and faceted approaches<\/h2>\n

The two difficulties just described have led, in the theory and practice of classification, to two broad approaches, and a directory’s<\/a> character depends heavily on which it adopts. The hierarchical approach is the one described above: a single tree, in which each item is assigned one place. Its strengths are real \u2014 it is easy to understand, it presents the user with a clear path to walk, and it gives a directory an immediately legible shape. Its weakness is exactly the multiple-membership problem: a tree has one route to each leaf, and the world it is filing does not.<\/p>\n

The faceted approach, whose principles were worked out in library science well before the web, takes the opposite starting point. Rather than assigning each item a single location, it describes each item along several independent dimensions, or facets, at once \u2014 a website might be described by its subject, by its geographic region, by its type, and by its intended audience, with each of these recorded separately. The user then narrows a search by combining facets, choosing a subject and a region and a type rather than walking a single path. The strength of the faceted approach is that it accommodates multiple membership naturally, because a site is never forced into one box; its weakness is that it is harder to present as a simple, browsable shape, and it asks more of the user, who must understand the facets in order to combine them. Many modern directories are, in practice, hybrids \u2014 a broad hierarchy for orientation, with facet-like filters layered on top \u2014 because the two approaches answer different needs and neither is sufficient alone.<\/p>\n

Table 1.<\/strong> Two approaches to organizing a directory<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Approach<\/th>\nHow it organizes<\/th>\nStrength<\/th>\nLimitation<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Hierarchical<\/td>\nOne subject tree; each site assigned a single place<\/td>\nClear, legible, easy to browse<\/td>\nCannot accommodate sites that belong in several places<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Faceted<\/td>\nSeveral independent dimensions; sites described, not boxed<\/td>\nHandles multiple membership naturally<\/td>\nHarder to present simply; asks more of the user<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The editor’s craft: guidelines and consistency<\/h2>\n

If categorizing the web<\/a> is as difficult as the preceding sections have argued, a fair question is how any directory manages it at all, and the answer lies in a set of editorial practices worth describing, because they are the craft that holds a directory together. The first is the editorial guideline. A directory of any size cannot leave each placement to the unaided instinct of whichever editor happens to handle it, because instinct varies, and so directories codify their decisions: written rules that state what belongs in a given category<\/a> and what does not, how the standard for inclusion should be applied, and where a site of an ambiguous kind should be sent. A guideline does not remove judgement \u2014 the difficulties described above guarantee that judgement remains necessary \u2014 but it constrains it, so that two editors confronting similar sites are at least more likely to treat them alike.<\/p>\n

The second practice is the cross-reference. Because a strict hierarchy cannot, by itself, accommodate a site that belongs in several places, directories<\/a> have long borrowed a device from the library: the “see also”, a pointer placed in one category that directs the user to a related category elsewhere in the tree. A cross-reference does not abolish the multiple-membership problem, but it softens it, by ensuring that a user who took a reasonable wrong turning is at least shown the way back to the right one. The third practice, and the hardest to sustain, is consistency itself. A directory maintained over years by many hands is under constant pressure to drift \u2014 categories accrete unevenly, standards loosen in the corners that receive least attention, the same kind of site comes to be filed two ways in two branches \u2014 and a directory that does not actively work<\/a> against this drift will slowly lose the coherence that made it worth consulting in the first place. The maintenance of consistency is therefore not a finishing touch but an ongoing labour, and it is largely invisible: a user notices a directory’s inconsistency at once, and never notices the editorial work that prevented it. Taken together, these practices are what the abstract idea of classification looks like when it is actually carried out by people, day after day, against the difficulties this article has set out.<\/p>\n

Human editors and automatic classification<\/h2>\n

A final question is who, or what, does the categorizing. For most of the web directory’s history<\/a> the answer was human editors, who read a site and placed it, and the discussion above has assumed as much. But the labour involved is considerable, and the obvious thought \u2014 that the placement could be done by software \u2014 has been pursued in research for a long time. Dumais and Chen (2000), working with a large body of web content, showed that automatic classifiers could be trained to file web pages into a category hierarchy, and that exploiting the structure of the hierarchy itself \u2014 deciding the broad category first, then the narrower one \u2014 improved the result. Automatic classification of this kind is now mature, and it is part of how large modern systems make sense of the web at a scale no body of editors could match.<\/p>\n

It does not, however, dissolve the difficulties this article has described, and it is worth being clear why. An automatic classifier still needs a classification to file things into, and that hierarchy of categories must still be authored by someone, with all the judgement that authoring involves. The classifier still faces the fuzzy boundaries that Rosch and Mervis identified, and resolves them by producing a confidence score rather than a certainty. And it still faces multiple membership, which it handles, at best, by assigning a site to several categories with different probabilities. Automatic classification changes the economics of the work \u2014 it makes categorizing the web at scale feasible \u2014 but the underlying intellectual problem, that the web does not divide itself and any division is an authored argument, remains exactly where it was. The machine has made the filing cheaper; it has not made the world tidier.<\/p>\n

Concluding remarks<\/h2>\n

How a web directory<\/a> organizes the web is, at bottom, a single hard problem wearing several faces. The directory imposes a classification, and a classification is authored rather than discovered \u2014 a theory of how a domain divides. The classical expression of that theory is a hierarchy, a tree the user descends, and the hierarchy runs into two difficulties that are not failures of effort but properties of classification itself: categories have fuzzy edges rather than sharp ones, and many websites have an equal claim to several places at once. The faceted approach answers the second difficulty at the cost of simplicity, and most real directories blend the two. Software can now do much of the placement, and at a scale no editorial staff could reach, but it inherits the same difficulties rather than escaping them. A directory’s quality, in the end, rests less on how many sites it lists than on how well it has thought through the structure it lists them in \u2014 which is to say that the unglamorous and mostly invisible work of classification is not the preparation for a directory’s value but very nearly the whole of it, and a reader judging a directory would do well to look first at its categories rather than at its size.<\/p>\n

Future developments<\/h2>\n

The likely path of change is toward classification that is less visible to the user and more capable underneath. As automatic methods improve, the rigid single tree is likely to recede as the thing a user actually sees, replaced by faceted filtering and by systems that can place a site under several headings at once without forcing the editor’s awkward choice. The harder and more durable point is that none of this removes the authored core of the work. Some person or some team must still decide what the categories are and what divisions of a subject are worth making, because that decision is a judgement about meaning, and meaning is exactly what an automatic classifier consumes rather than produces. The web directory of the coming years will probably categorize more fluidly and more cheaply than the hand-built hierarchies of the past \u2014 but the question it answers, namely how a domain is best divided so that a person can find their way through it, will remain a question of judgement, and judgement is the part that does not automate.<\/p>\n

References<\/h2>\n

Broder, A., Kumar, R., Maghoul, F., Raghavan, P., Rajagopalan, S., Stata, R., Tomkins, A., & Wiener, J. (2000). Graph structure in the web. Computer Networks<\/em>, 33(1\u20136), 309\u2013320.<\/p>\n

Brin, S., & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems<\/em>, 30(1\u20137), 107\u2013117.<\/p>\n

Dumais, S. T., & Chen, H. (2000). Hierarchical classification of web content. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’00)<\/em> (pp. 256\u2013263). Athens, Greece<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. B. (1975). Family<\/a> resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology<\/em>, 7(4), 573\u2013605.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The previous articles in this series defined the web directory and set it against the search engine. This one examines the part of the directory that is easiest to take for granted and hardest to do well: the work of organizing and categorizing \u2014 of deciding what goes where. A directory is, in the end, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22047,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[737],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-directories"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Web Directories Organize and Categorize the Web<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The previous articles in this series defined the web directory and set it against the search engine. 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