[forestwizard1]

You know how in the yellow pages phone books for your city, county, or major metropolitan area you have different categories, with business listings under each one? Like under the category "Yard Services" you have a listing for every company in your area that offers yard services? A web directory is the same thing. It is broken down into different categories, with direct links to websites relating to that category. Like the yellow pages, some websites might pay a small fee to advertise themselves, or have themselves listed in the directory. Most web directories charge nothing to be listed at all, but they may charge some fee to be in their "top 10" or "top picks."If you want homework help and went to a web directory, all you have to do is go to the category "homework help", or go through a stream of categories and sub-categories until you find the "homework help" category. There will be a list of websites or other pages related to the web directory that offer homework help.Web rings are considered to be one form of web directories. A web ring is a "ring" or "network" of websites that may have one thing in common, like a web ring of sites dealing with homework help, ghosts, pets, music, a particular state, or anything else.A web search engine does not have a designated list of websites, or a directory, if you will. Search engines will scan websites for keywords or phrases entered. Unlike web directories, search engines will look in any website that may contain the content you're looking for.For example, if you entered "homework help" in a search engine, you will get sites returned to you not offering homework help, but may contain the text "homework help" in any form within the body of the sites' content. You might also get sites offering homework help, but you have to weed through several other links until you find it, or pages and pages of links. You might find sites that offer homework help, but you will also see sites that have the words "homework" and/or "help" in their content, including forums for websites you don't really care to visit, someone's blog, and other sites.