well basically i just want exactly the same as what dmoz.com use, ie not for searching but for category management so that you don't have to have A, B, C, D etc going down a page that just looks stupid.

I think that is perhaps what you mean but the last line but not sure. There was quite a long discussion about alphabar and dmoz.com implementation of it somewhere but i guess it got dropped. Someone also made the mod for the old links by adding a field inside category so that it was a different type of category and then just a different routine to build those categories differently. I had no luck trying to get it to work for NG

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal