Starting from Tim Berners-Lee's revolutionary work that kicked off its wide-spread, common usage in early 1990s, the World Wide Web of the Internet has never looked back in terms of growth in the number of web sites.
Then, in mid 90s, as old timers would remember, came Yahoo!, armed with a sizeable team of human reviewers / editors, with a mission to categorize the growing web. Somewhat later came Netscape's initiative of achieving the same results, albeit, with a slightly different twist viz. that of using volunteer editors to build and maintain the DMOZ web directory.
In the meanwhile, the uncontrolled, exponential growth in the size of the web made it almost impossible for web directories to keep up with everything using human effort and in stepped spider based search engines like AltaVista, Northern Light, InfoSeek, Excite, Lycos and a few others. Most of these search engines quickly fell pray to the wild growth and increasing commercialization of the Internet in general and the WWW in particular, rendering them almost useless in terms of finding quality information on the web. With the swiftness that can only be achieved by bright-eyed (and bright-minded) fresh university graduates, Larry and Sergey's Google stepped in to fill the void with its incredibly relevant search results and before anyone (well, almost any one) knew it, gained the position of the search engine of choice for untold millions of web users and the rest, as they say, is history.
One of the fallouts of all these events was that the notion of web directories as useful tools to navigate through the vast expanses of the web was lost almost in to oblivion. While most of the older - and major - web directories still exist in one form or another, and many new minor ones have sprung up over the years, The Big Web Directory(tbwd.org) is yet another humble attempt to build a directory of 100% human reviewed web sites.
