DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

Posts Tagged ‘Near’

The casket was all but closed on the venerable Open Directory Project (ODP, or dmoz.org ). A December 16 blog post by an ODP founder, Rich Skrenta, “DMOZ had 9 lives. Used up yet?” , suggested that the directory at DMOZ is now, like Marley’s ghost, deader than a doornail. DMOZ was down and, for over a month and a half, it looked like it was down for the count.

In reality, DMOZ is not dead though the rumours of its demise were not exactly exaggerated either. Because this six-week unscheduled outage followed several years of consumer dissatisfaction, lagging editorial energy, and layoffs at AOL, many made the logical assumption that the plug had been pulled.

While the website still functions as a searchable directory, its editing functions have only just been restored after six weeks of downtime. Since the last week in October, editors and submitters have been greeted by versions of a customized DMOZ 404 page. DMOZ was basically a dead directory referencing over 4 million websites spanning nearly 600,000 categories. Though editing has been
restored, it is still not possible to submit new sites.

Even if webmasters could submit new sites, chances are they would not receive timely editorial attention. For the last few years, webmasters have complained about the now legendary backlog of sites awaiting review and inclusion. It can take months or even years for spelling mistakes to be corrected and an enormous number of the 590,000 categories that make up the directory do not even have editors. Though many webmasters consider the Open Directory useless because of that backlog, it still swings a big weíght in the search sector.

The greatest success of the Open Directory Project stems from the free database access offered to any other search entity. The majority of search engines and directories use the ODP’s RDF-esque data-dump to help populate their databases. As every ODP listing is human edited, Google and other search engines have tended to treat ODP references as trustable sites. Carrying a PageRank of 8, links from the ODP continue to be considered Google-Gold by SEOs. Other search engines receiving results from the DMOZ directory include Ask, Yahoo and AOL. Clearly the ODP remains an important entity in the search space.

Read the rest of this entry »