Subject trees on the internet: A new role for bibliographic classification?

Internet information retrieval is largely the preserve of search engines and the even more popular subject trees. Subject trees have adapted principles of conventional bibliographic classification for structuring hierarchic browsing interfaces, thus providing easily used pathways to their selected resources. This combination of browsing and selectivity is especially valuable to untrained users. For the foreseeable future, it appears that subject trees will remain the Internet's only practicable use of classificatory methods for information retrieval.