Direct Hit and Open Directory Project were each developed in response to the the leading search engines' major weakness - large numbers of irrelevant sites appearing in the list of search results.
Both Direct Hit (which is a selective search engine) and Open Directory Project (a huge directory) attempt to return only the most relevant items about a subject. Although neither can always substitute successfully for a general search engine, both are effective, and are being used by a number of search engines (including HotBot, Lycos and AOL.Net.com) to supplement their services. In fact Direct Hit uses Open Directory Project as its website directory.
DIRECT HIT - POPULARITY IS THE KEY
The basic assumption behind Direct Hit is that the most visited sites resulting from many keyword searches about the same subject are the most relevant sites for that subject. Guided by this concept, its software tracks the results of million of searches and determines the most visited sites. When you enter search words, the sites that other people have visited the most often for the same or similar searches are displayed.
Excellent Results For Some Searches: Returning sites that are popular among web searchers works extremely well for searches about many subjects - especially those that are commonly searched for.
Suppose you wanted to learn more about treasury bonds At Direct Hit, using the keywords treasury bonds, the first few items you would retrieve are sites where you could learn about treasury bonds, look at their interest rates, buy them directly from the government, etc. If you did same search in the average large search engine, you'd have to wade through many listings for brokerages, bond funds, out-of-date newspaper articles, and so forth, to find the relevant sites.
Search words do not have to be extremely common to produce worthwhile results. For example, individual searches for Molossus hound (an ancient Roman breed of dog) and Irving Langmuir (who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1932) were both successful.
Although, there is no way to predict which searches will be effective in Direct Hit, as a general rule the more common your subject, the more likely Direct Hit will be valuable for your search. Conversely, if your subject is extremely specialized, complicated or detailed, it's probably best to try another engine.
