Desi Online!

Desi Online!

There are so many different nationalities and heritage groups that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. It can be even more frustrating to find businesses of certain nationalities; for instance, a customer who emigrated from India may have trouble finding Indian restaurants and other businesses run by fellow Desi Indians. This can be ever more frustrating for those who speak only their native language and who are searching out Desi businesses for practical communication reasons as well as to connect with others from their region.

Fortunately, this is not a quiet problem. It is well known that many people prefer to deal with people of their own nationality or heritage. To that end, there have been a large number of companies cropping up to help people of the same nationality connect with each other. Because there are so many claiming this heritage, there has been a boom of Desi search engines and Desi classifieds to help facilitate both the location of and communication between Desi Indians.

A simple web search for the term “Desi businesses” returns almost five million hits; fortunately, many of these hits are of Desi business directories. Such online yellow pages include such engines as Desi11, North America’s Desi Business Directory, and Punjab In US. All of these Desi Search engines list every business category – food, clothing, hotels, attorneys, places of worship, etc. – and all of them are Desi-run businesses. This is great news for those who don’t speak English and for those who want to deal exclusively with native speakers.

But what about a resource for those who want to post ads and try to reach Desi Indians that way? Again, the technology of this day and age has risen to the occasion. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of websites out there where ads can be posted and responded to, most often, if not all the time, for free. And they’re all geared exclusively for Desi Indians. These Desi classifieds are the best place to post ads regarding new and used car sales, the sale of pretty much any type of item, the offering of services for a price, and the best place for exposure of housing offers and requests. Sales of airline, concert, and resort tickets are also a big part of the Desi classifieds. Of course, perhaps the best thing Desi classifieds have to offer Desi Indians is jobs. This is such a great marketplace for job hunters because Desi businesses looking for reliable help of the same heritage can post job offers and openings, confident that a Desi Indian will respond to the posting.

It can easily be argued that Desi classifieds have helped connect more Desi Indians than commonplace meetings. Likewise, Desi search engines have offered more exposure to a specified marketplace than general advertisements. The internet has increased the business of Desi businesses and Desi Indians in a way never seen before, and it’s definitely been for the better.

Online Directories: The Real Direction of the Internet

Online Directories: The Real Direction of the Internet

Back in the early days of the Internet, there were only human-edited directories. These were found primarily in specialized browsers like the Archie or Veronica systems. Later, Yahoo! used the same basic idea to create a descriptive listing of websites. This was the birth of the first major online directory for the public World Wide Web.

Online directories have been around since the first days of the Internet, and without them and search engines we'd have no simple way of navigating through the sites. Today, there are thousands of directories online, which can make it very confusing to determine which are giving you the best quality information.

In fact, many online directories are no better than junk. Unfortunately, with Google's AdSense program, it has become very profitable in some cases to put together a directory just so you can run ads on it. These sites are automated and certainly no better than you might think.

The best directories are the ones edited by dedicated humans, not dedicated servers. That's because a human being knows what you really need to know, while a computer doesn't care. Examples of these are Yahoo!, which has a search engine component, but still maintains its directory content; and Dmoz, an open directory run by volunteers that also has pretty good quality content. These directories, and the many quality paid directories that exist, will be around for a very long time.

Search Engines or Directories: What's The Difference?

To understand why directories may be the future of online searching, you should understand the difference between a search engine and a directory.

Search engines catalogue the full text of a web site. This text is stored in a database and made fully searchable. The information appearing next to a link is dependent upon the metatag information in the web page, or upon the section of the text where the search term first appears. There is no human intervention, and no guarantee of quality.

A directory is quite different. Human editors place each site in the directory. They've gone out and examined the sites in question, put data together to clarify what the site's really about, and ranked it more fairly than a search engine could. And the new generation of directories includes wiki technologies and content that helps define a topic as well as show you where to go for further information.

What About Wikis?

Wikis are community-edited informational sites, and they're showing up all over the place. The first was Wikipedia, recently known for an act of vandalism that made up one person's background. This incident was heavily covered in the media, and may have coloured the opinions of many people. However, this incident was atypical of wikis. Nature magazine and other science editors recently did a quick review of Wikipedia's science content, and determined that it was at least as accurate and up to date as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Wikis are proving themselves to be both valuable and accurate. They are also a great place to go for directory-style and in-text links to sites to deepen your information. Pretty soon, a wiki is going to be a natural place to go to search for information on just about anything.

Paid Versus Unpaid Directories

There are both paid and unpaid directories as well. Some of these directories are basically clones of Dmoz and other popular directory sites; this means the owner licensed with the directory to duplicate it, and then sold advertising on it. The site owner gets directory content with little or no work on his part, as well as the advertising revenue.

Not all unpaid directories are like that, of course, but you do get what you pay for. A paid directory is both original and human edited. It can also afford to pay for extras like advertising and marketing, ensuring the directory is known by the public. Paid directories can also employ SEO experts who can work toward raising the search engine rating of the site, and traffic experts who can monitor and increase the traffic to the website.

In the long run, listing with all the unpaid directories is okay, but listing with paid directories gives you an edge. And in today's marketplace, you need every edge you can get.