BeeDeeDubbleU - 5:38 pm on Feb 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

Good directories do much better than that.

The overwhelming majority of directories are created not to help surfers but to generate ad revenue for their owners. The Internet is stuffed with these at present and anything Google can do to get rid of them would be most welcome in my opinion. Inevitably there will be collateral damage and some "good" directories may be lost but ...

Directories are particularly valuable where search engines fail

... if all of the useless directories were removed the search engines would be less likely to fail. These directories are one of the main reasons for the problems we are facing at present.