There is now such a wealth of lesbian and gay resources on the Internet that it may seem hard to know where to start looking. In such circumstances the best place to start is generally a search engine or directory, or perhaps, to use the strange jargon of Internet marketing-speak, a vertical portal.
In simple terms, the difference between a search engine and a directory is that a search engine uses an index built and maintained by programs known as robots (or spiders, or crawlers) which constantly chunter around the Web, mechanically following links from page to page, many of them analysing and indexing the entire text of each page they encounter, whereas a directory is a normally hierarchical catalogue built and maintained by human editors who review and classify (or reject) each site that comes to their attention. A portal is the Web equivalent of a “one-stop shop” – a commercial site providing an interface to a wide range of services such as news, entertainment, shopping and web hosting in addition to search facilities; for example, Yahoo!, once the archetypal directory, has metamorphosed itself into a portal. And a “vertical” portal is one targeted at a specific market or community. The largest portals aimed at the lesbian and gay community are PlanetOut and Gay.com, both based in San Francisco, who in November announced their intention to merge.
The original queer resource on the Internet is the Queer Resources Directory (QRD). This is not a directory in the sense described above but an electronic archive of some 25,000 files. Set up in 1991, the QRD pre-dates widespread public access to the Internet by several years. According to its 1994 vision statement, “It is a goal for the QRD to contain every scrap of knowledge which has been used in or is part of the struggle for full equality” for sexual minorities. Sadly, although the QRD remains a valuable resource as far as it goes, it has become increasingly moribund over recent years. Sporadic updates continued well into 2000 – for example, the archive of Rex Wockner’s weekly International News Briefs extends almost unbroken from the first edition in 1994 up to July 2000, as does that of his fortnightly column Quote Unquote – but the site’s infrastructure has not been maintained and as a result the web view of the QRD is starting to look decidedly dated.
Numerous lesbian and gay directories are now available. They vary widely both in size and in quality. Typically they rely on website owners to submit their sites with a description and suggested classification, the directory owner merely vetting submitted sites for suitability. A sample of good-quality directories includes – in increasing order of size – the relatively tiny Portal (which isn’t a portal!) (300 links), HomoRama, Pride Link (1,300 links), the similarly-named Pride Links (8,000 links), and Gayscape (56,000 links). Figures are those claimed by the sites themselves but, although these are hard to verify, they seem plausible.
Perhaps the best among the UK-specific directories is GayToZ. It lists several thousand UK lesbian and gay businesses and organisations, but because it’s based on the printed directory of the same name, these include a significant proportion without a website. Another sizable UK directory is the Gay Index, part of a portal known as Gay Britain Network.
Many of these directories claim to be “search engines” whereas in fact all they search is the information held in the directory itself – typically the titles and one-line descriptions of the sites listed. For a true lesbian and gay search engine, turn to Rainbow Query, a substantial and high-quality directory that also provides a full search of the sites it indexes. A good alternative is the search box on PlanetOut’s home page, which uses intelligent filtering of data supplied by Google (see below) to provide some impressive results.
Even for a specialised search it’s wise not to overlook the general-purpose search engines. There are a vast number of these but, fortunately for ease of choice, one has emerged from research work at Stanford University to overtake its rivals in almost every respect during the last two years. Google is a pleasure to use for its speed of response, relevance of results, size of index, paucity of broken links, and excellent user interface. Among other things the home page must surely be one of the cleanest on the Web. If you use only one search engine, this should be it.
The pre-eminent global directory of websites is the Open Directory, which depends on the efforts of some 30,000 volunteer editors to maintain its growing catalogue of more than two million sites. Over 2,000 of these appear under the main Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual category, with a further 160 or so under its UK-specific counterpart. Evidently there’s a shortage of UK editors! A number of the major search engines, including Google, use the Open Directory data as the basis of their own structured directories. The Open Directory project is owned by Netscape, which is now part of America Online, so let’s hope that recent publicity associating AOL’s chief executive with the ex-gay movement isn’t a bad omen.