Why is the Yahoo! directory better than a plain old search engine? Well, even before Mosaic was a glimmer in Marc Andreesen's eye, Donald Norman was laying out the ground rules:

"McGuckin's Hardware Store shows to what we might aspire: efficient, intelligents agents, coupled with a functional arrangement that makes browsing a pleasure and a source of unexpected finds...With modern tools, it is perfectly feasible to develop artifacts for maintaining information files without any particular ordering. That is, one can store the information internally in any format one wishes but reconfigure it in numerous flexible ways at the whim of the user."