Prince George's Community College

301 Largo Road
Largo, Maryland 20774

Subject directories are also helpful for researching information when you want to approach your topic from a broad perspective. Directories provide access to information by subject categories with browsing capabilities. Some provide annotations of the sites listed. Unlike search engines, human beings categorize the information instead of computers. Most subject directories have search engines to query their databases using a keyword search or advanced search. Recognizing a search engine from a directory is becoming less distinguishable because many search engines have subject directories. Click on the Search Engines and Subject Directories page of the Prince George's Community College Library's Web site to review selected subject directories.

Yahoo, the oldest and probably the most popular subject directory, is divided into topical areas with related subject headings. To browse the subjects to find information on the topic what is the relationship between United States intelligence operations and counterterrorism, you would select government as your subject from the homepage; next click on U.S. Government; and then click on National Security.

Click on the screen image below and go to this page. Next click on Terrorism@. After the page loads, look under the Categories heading and click on the Counter-Terrorism link.

While some subject directories such as Yahoo have a distinct subject heading for browsing to locate resources on this topic, others may not such as

Click on the screen image below and notice the different categories counter terrorism united states intelligence is classified (right of URL in parentheses) in the About network. Notice the Web sites that appear below the categorized items are on the Web.

To learn how to evaluate the resources that you retrieve, go to the next module.

Comparing Internet Subject Directories