Do engineers like online directories?

I am preparing my talk for the InfoCommerce Conference coming up in a couple weeks. At the same time I am working on renewing my ThomasNet contract. I think you will see much of my posts leading up to the program centering around online directories.

Here's a fun one to start...Googling "thomas register globalspec" lead to this forum discussion: Where do you find info online?, posted by someone considering GS advertising. A couple responses from the engineers:

"The company lists don't seem to help me too much (GlobalSpec, TR, etc.) The categories are too broad, and clicking on 20 of them to find the one product I need is is a lot more difficult than letting Google do the searching."

"It seems like TR or GlobalSpec just want to give you to an unorganized list of the paying advertisers that generally might match your search string regardless of what you are looking for, oh well."

What these two comments imply is that using these directories requires more effort than Google. They are still left with the need to filter and/or flip thru each vendor's site. Depending on the sophistication of the search, this can quickly kill the directories' chance to help.