Internet Trail Guide

by Tom Giebel

Many directories are maintained by watchful list-keepers who check every item. Some are created by automated agents who systematically walk the Web in search of new resources or solicit information from Internet users. You will find some redundancy when searching more than one site, but this is still more efficient than relying on a serendipitous surf. You'll save time and find more information.

A word about information gathered from the Internet: Many offerings are semiofficial or experimental, offering no guarantee of accuracy or completeness. You'll probably want to research the origins of a database before staking your job on it.

The WWW Virtual Library from CERN offers topical and geographic indexes to Web sites. The WWW Virtual Library is a distributed catalog; different topics are maintained by different sites.

The WWWW--World-Wide Web Worm is an automated system that scans the Web and creates a searchable catalog.

The CUI W3 Catalog from the University of Geneva offers a searchable interface to several manually maintained Internet catalogs.

Solinet features assembled pointers to a nice collection of on-line ready-reference tools such as directories, dictionaries, thesauri, and library catalogs.

The Online Whole Internet Catalog is a hypertext version of the resource guide from the Whole Internet Catalog from O'Reilly & Associates.

The Internet Town Hall, a service of the Internet Multicasting Service, is a good starting point to access a variety of Internet-based information.

Harvest, sponsored by the Internet Research Task Force on Resource Discovery, is an ambitious project to gather and organize information about the Internet. You can perform a WAIS search of Harvest brokers, computer-science technical reports, and Web pages--all from this site.

The Web at Nexor offers a variety of Internet directories. You can perform keyword searches in the CUSI and ALIWEB databases, and search for files on anonymous FTP sites using ArchiePlex.

The Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides, a joint effort of the University of Michigan's University Library and School of Information and Library Studies, offers a searchable database of subject guides available on the Internet.

Galaxy from EINet is another exhaustive directory of Internet resources, organized by subject and fully searchable.

The Mother-of-all-BBS is a subject-oriented directory of Web pages. The Mother-of-all-BBS service solicits information about new Internet sites from users.

Yahoo: A Guide to the WWW is another popular subject-oriented guide to the Web, updated frequently.

U.S. GOVERNMENT SITES

The U.S. government is one of the most prolific providers of information on the Internet. The following sites link to a wealth of information from or about the federal government.

• FedWorld
• Government Information Locator Service GILS
• White House: An Interactive Citizens' Handbook
• Library of Congress