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The WorldSwitch.com®
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The WorldSwitch.com®
family of Web Sites |
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The WorldSwitch Project
The WorldSwitch Project is designed to provide a simple and easy way to find sites on the Internet.
The Problems:
Many Directories have too few links, or often have too many links that just don't work.
Information and links exist in fragments, or islands, throughout the
Internet. Different sites have varying amounts of the pieces of the
puzzle. Because of link 'sharing', a bad link on one site is likely to get propagated
throughout the whole Internet, taking weeks or months to find and correct.
Search Engines do a
great job - if you manage to stumble onto the 'right' keyword. The
incredible volume of information, and the number of sites on the Internet, make
it almost impossible for the 'search bots' to find sites and all the
related pieces of information, and then get those sites properly
categorized. All too often, many of the 'results pages' have very little
to do with what you are looking for, even though you frequently get enough pages
to fill a dump truck! (Recently, on a popular search engine, the keyword
"world" yielded 24,913,228 items!) And with search engine
rankings of sites, and paid placement, you may have to wade through several paid
results to find what you are really looking for.
Most of the sites on the Internet seem to give priority to their own area of the
world, while ignoring almost everyone else. That's good if you happen to
live in a large, technologically advanced country. But sites located in
the majority of the countries of the world do not yet have a strong
enough Internet presence to promote their own National identity.
Many sites have pages that
are very slow loading, and are cluttered with ads and pop-ups.
Newcomers to the Internet can be overwhelmed and bewildered by the
labyrinth of sites that already exist. There is no overall picture, or
map, of what exists on the World's Information Superhighway. Many fine
sites are lost in the vast sea of literally hundreds of thousands of other
sites.
Imagine taking a trip across the country with only city maps, and no state or national maps. Or taking a trip without a map, and having to ask directions at every city you come to. That's the Internet!
The Direction:
Many sites, and many directories,
are providing more and more links to other sites
and directories.
Search engines are refining the intelligence used in their searches.
Some search engines are migrating their techniques to a hybrid between a search
engine and a directory.
Major search engines have created sites in other countries.
Sites are beginning to produce pages that are cleaner, simpler and quicker
loading.
There are newspapers, magazines, books and TV programs available to help
discover what exists on the Web.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/
is a vendor neutral, non-profit organization working to lead the Web to its full
potential through better infrastructure, policies, standards and technologies.
The dmoz Open Directory
Project http://dmoz.org/about.html is a
consortium of companies working together to produce a comprehensive Internet
Directory edited by human volunteers. Several of the major search engines
are already using this data base for higher quality results. Downloads are
free, and so is the license to use the database.
The WorldSwitch Solution:
Our mission is to provide a hand-checked, quality global road map of all available sources of information. We are not in competition with search engines, directories, yellow pages, people finders, announcement sites, newsgroups, or other 'hot' sites. We just want to make it easy to find all those sites! We want to have a site that is as simple and easy to use as the bookmarks on your computer, and, if possible, about as quick. (Our site doesn't have a lot of graphics or "glitz", and we don't give away money.)
We are also providing a "home page" for every country in the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. A place where people of the world, both newcomers to the Internet and old timers alike, can quickly and easily find all the known information about sites in a country, or links to search engines, directories that specialize in that country, or promote their own sites. Our information gathering priority is for the less visible countries of the world on the Web.
After business people, travelers, teachers, students, 'surfers' and newcomers to the Internet decide where they want to go today, we would like to provide a simple answer to the next question, which is, "How are you going to get there?"
Being understaffed and under funded, we estimate that it will take approximately five years before our basic mission is completed. Given the growth of the Web, and the constant change, our ongoing mission to stay current will take forever.
We can use
all the help we can get! Help us find International links, or links on
topics or sites that need better visibility. And please let us know if we have a bad
link.
Thanks, and happy
surfin' 
The Worldswitch.com Team
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