How are sites assigned a Category?

...and how can it be changed?

[Storyman]

A couple of months ago I put up an experimental site in which I wanted to use as a 'shake down cruise' to hone my knowledge about SEO. This forum has been extremely helpful in my quest for knowledge and would like to express my appreciation to all those who contribute to this forum.

Prior to today the site has not shown to have an assigned category--at least according to the MicroTrend AntiFraud Toolbar installed on the toolbar. Now that a category has been assigned it is a category only appropriate for the home page.

Question #1:
Who assigns the category and how is that information shared with toolbars like Goggle's and MicroTrend's?

The best way to describe the site is that has a couple dozen chapters from an 1899 history textbook. Because the home page has information primarily relating to Pirates the site has been assigned the category; Type: Weapons/Military; Detail: Weapons.

Other pages deal with Fulton's Steam Engine while still others deal with the Civil War. Anyway you get the idea that a lot of topics are covered. All of the site's pages have the same Weapons/Military designation.

Question #2:
Are sites assigned just one category based on the index page or are individual pages every assigned a category different than the one assigned to the index page?

Frankly, I was hoping the site would be assigned the category: Education. In that effort the site was submitted to Yahoo under that category.

Question #3:
How does one go about having a site category reassigned?

Question #4:
Will redesigning the home page to reflect content from throughout the entire site (civil war, steam engine, Louisiana Purchase, etc.) be a viable option to getting the site's category reassigned?

Please keep in mind that what happens with this site is purely for the purposes of learning about SEO and related topics. The final home for this site will have a different URL.

[Storyman]

I realize that this is one of the lesser discussed topics in search engine promotions, but it is germane and hope that someone can shed light on categories.

[Robert Charlton]

Storyman - Sites are not assigned categories, at least not by crawler-based search engines, like Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

You may be thinking of directories, which are edited by humans and which are organized by category. Examples of such directories are Open Directory (dmoz.org) which also populates the Google Directory and many others, and the Yahoo Directory.

Answers to your questions regarding directory categorization depend upon the particular directory and are best taken up in the Directories Forum.

I have no idea what toolbar you're asking about.