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After 19 Years, DMOZ Will Close, Announces AOL
Its volunteer-edited web directory formed the basis for early search offerings from Netscape, AOL, and Google. But 19 years later, there's some bad news. koavf
writes:
As posted on the DMOZ homepage, the Open Directory Project's web listing will go offline on March 14, 2017. Founded in 1998 as "Gnuhoo", the human-curated directory once powered Google and served as a model for Wikipedia.
A 1998 Slashdot editorial prompted Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation to complain about how "Gnu" was used in the site's name. "We renamed GnuHoo to NewHoo," a blog post later explained, "but then Yahoo objected to the 'Hoo' (and our red letters, exclamation point, and 'comical font')." After being acquired for Netscape's "Open Directory Project," their URL became directory.mozilla.org, which was shortened to DMOZ. Search Engine Land predicts the memory of the Open Directory Project will still be kept alive by the NOODP meta tag.
The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?
A 1998 Slashdot editorial prompted Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation to complain about how "Gnu" was used in the site's name. "We renamed GnuHoo to NewHoo," a blog post later explained, "but then Yahoo objected to the 'Hoo' (and our red letters, exclamation point, and 'comical font')." After being acquired for Netscape's "Open Directory Project," their URL became directory.mozilla.org, which was shortened to DMOZ. Search Engine Land predicts the memory of the Open Directory Project will still be kept alive by the NOODP meta tag.
The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?
Hopefully the archive team will get a good mirror of the site.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
i ran a motorcycle related website for several years. i listed the site on dmoz. was consistently at the top of searches because of it.
i started getting phone calls from SEO companies, claiming they could get my website to the top of all searches. so i asked how they found my website. was told they searched for it. and where were they finding it? already at the top. silly people.
Let's start with eradicating people who don't know when to make a paragraph.
The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?
Yeah... don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Seriously - this is an idea whose time past many, many years ago.
#DeleteChrome
or is this prejudiced DNS protocol? why notburnit on CDROM and deliver by Snailmail for $1?
or Boo Gnu. funtimes.
If you want to help us continue the Open Directory Project, you can join at the Resource Zone: https://www.resource-zone.com/
Yeah, I remember I worked at a newspaper and the publisher mistakenly thought that since we were listed toward the top of our category on DMOZ, that we'd be listed as such on Yahoo, Google, etc. It was next to impossible to tell her how wrong she was so I let her keep believing it. AFAIK, she's probably still thinking that the paper's name has some form of positive influence on their ranking.
I have never heard of this site (I resisted the temptation of saying "hurd of this site").
I've been using "the internet" since 1988 or so when I thought it was called "arpanet". I am very familiar with usenet. Pretty sure this thing never really mattered.
Some years ago, a site I was involved with was moving. Someone contacted DMOZ with a simple request not to keep listing the old address, because their influence on search engines was distorting the rankings and putting the old, soon-to-disappear, out-of-date site higher than the new, up-to-date one. That was creating significant problems for people getting the wrong information, and that in turn was causing a lot of hassle and wasted time for our volunteer organisers who had to clean up the mess. The DMOZ rep basically told us they wouldn't change anything because they were there for users not site operators. They couldn't seem to understand that what we were asking was in the interests of those users, nor why we blocked all traffic giving their site as a referrer from both sites afterwards. From our perspective, it might have been a well-intentioned idea, but it was run by people with a terrible attitude and ultimately did more harm than good.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Massively out of date and useless, and not accepting new volunteer help as well for the last 10 years.
A dead organization.
Will the internet suffer from not archiving DMOZ. Probably not. If possible a list of original websites registered with DMOZ within the first couple of years should be archived for internet historical reasons. I had a handful of websites registered with DMOZ. I'm old.
Back then if your website wasn't registered with DMOZ and spidered it was almost considered part of the dark web. DMOZ was a very important thing if you were a web designer. DNS wasn't as prolific back then so you actually had to register your site to get crawled by spiders. Any site worth mentioning was registered with DMOZ, from Intel's website down to your domain name hosted on Geocities or Angelfire. It was a guaranteed way to get your content indexed by search engines during a time when there was no guarantee that a search engine could find you. So yeah DMOZ did help a ton of aspiring web designers to get their websites noticed by major search engines during the internets infancy.
The internet doesn't work that way today, you can't even put up a public facing homepage on your home network without it getting crawled within a day. Today every IP and port in the world is constantly being pinged, scanned, and scraped by spiders. 1997-1999 was completely the opposite, it was hard to get discovered! You had to go out of your way and register your website with spidering sites. Each search provider like Yahoo/Google/DogPile/etc.. had their own online form so registering with each spider was very tedious. DMOZ consolidated all of them into 1 form saving you a ton of time and effort. Search providers found you by traversing DMOZ, saving them resources as well. If you wanted your website to be publicly visible DMOZ really helped get that process started for you or your company, for free.
DMOZ played a very important role. I remember them fondly for making my life easier.
http://astalavista.box.sk/
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This attitude killed dmoz long before it became outdated, and it threatens much of the web today. No site may be under a legal obligation to disclose why a particular decision was made, but they are all under a moral obligation; and, I believe, it is only a matter of time before it becomes a legal one for the big ones.
It will be a good thing. Too many are harmed when sites monopolize entire fields or means of social contact without accountability or interest in transparency.
No my friends, you must disclose if you wish to have any integrity. You may have made an error. You may have misidentified a user, or their background, or something else - and if you are never willing to tell them, they can never correct you and you can never be better.
And you must be better.
as in my days (daze), to get a better SEO reputation, getting listed by DMOZ was on the checklist. i liked DMOZ just like WINGNUT and GOPHER stuff... ahhhh how the days have passed when CUTEFTP and WINZIP were really needed. alas, i concede... gzip and other open source solutions at least still live on...
Back in the day, when search engines were nearly useless, curated directories like DMOZ were the best way to find what you were looking for. I used it a lot, and also curated some topics.
That said, I haven't even thought about the site in over a decade. This article prompted me to check: some of my entries are unchanged after all these years. Which just goes to show how inactive DMOZ has become. I'm actually surprised that it still exists - certainly, it is no longer relevant to the modern web.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
If you're using a monitor more than 1280 pixels wide don't complain you dumbfuck. Also, learn to use the zoom function.
More and more of the internet is dying, siphoned away into google or facebook.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
I remember the internet in the early '90s. You could go out and find an index that listed almost every site that existed, by category. DMOZ is a classic example of this. Mosaic browser on Unix machines... That brings back memories.
It was a great idea when it was created, but over time the landscape of the web changed. DMOZ was founded before Wikipedia and even Google, back in the days that finding stuff was *hard*. DMOZ editors would curate lists of sites that would give a good overview of the topic, but it turns out that Wikipedia's approach to topic curation was better in the long run (and I think that many DMOZ editors are also Wikipedia editors). Directories also died a death as search engines got better, and in the end DMOZ was only really important for SEO purposes.
A long outage at the end of 2006 didn't help at all, and many editors didn't come back after that. Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions. For a long time, DMOZ was a great and useful resource. I don't think it has been the case for a while though, but the data it curated is still of value and it would be good if it could be preserved somehow.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I recall well the brief window between the appearance of the WWW (that's what we called it) and the establishment of robust private backbones, when WWW access was good enough for individual site access (despite still using dial-up modems) but was horrible for doing bulk address scanning to find servers (still called "war dialing" for a while - terminology change took time). Accessing sites wasn't the problem, finding them was.
The first "link aggregators" were simple text pages full of links, typically hosted on academic servers and often shared via USENET. This process was error-prone and tough to keep current, just as was previously the case with BBS phone number lists shared via FidoNet.
But there was an early tool that helped: Just as "war dialing" for modems relied on accessing all numbers in the local exchanges (to avoid long-distance and interstate tolls, which once was a thing), a tool (whose name I forget) soon appeared that would scan for web servers across IP blocks based on latency: IP blocks with long latencies were skipped. The tool creators asked that its results be shared only when scanning public networks, though it was also used to probe internal accounts for unknown servers started by curious engineers. It was based on earlier tools used to find FTP, Gopher and Finger servers.
We used the IP scanning tool not only to find sites, but also to compare ping times to these sites from various ISPs, leading to the first ISP performance ranking charts (as well as modem and IP stack performance comparisons).
Many of us also wrote our own tools to obtain better statistics and automatically update link lists. The first online database application I ever used was one I helped build to bridge together a scanner, dBase, and a bare-bones WWW server on a creaky PC/AT running MS-DOS. I recall getting it to scan while serving was a major victory (I had to get the server to run as a TSR routine - remember those?).
It didn't take much for my little site to become popular enough to make it extremely unstable. And my ISP started to notice my saturated connection. The experiment ended within a few months.
If only I had thought to create a link ranking algorithm...
Oh no. Whatever will Mike Pence do for a search engine?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I fantasized about stealing their category hierarchy RDF file (i.e., structure.rdf.u8.gz ) - for building a classification thingamajig of my own. Here's their short sample: http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/struct...
Or just not bother reading posts from retarded antisocial obsessives.
I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.
One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead of, or in addition to, to a single hierarchical one.
Some of our listing for work by my wife and I from way back when (and the sadness is also much more for remaining unrealized potential on the projects -- still wanting to redo them in JavaScript for the browser -- than just DMOZ's passing):
http://www.dmoz.org/search?q=k...
Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Formerly commercial programs now available for free. Garden with Insight is a garden simulator, and PlantStudio is botanical illustration software.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
Home > Gardening > Landscaping
[That should really have been under Science > Software > Simulation]
Embedded Squeak, Speech Synthesizer
By Kurtz-Fernhout Software: version 1.0 for Squeak 2.2, by Paul Fernhout. Zip file has standalone Exe file to run Squeak in Win95 text-only console, and all source code (VC++ 5.0, Squeak 2.2) to produce it. [Open Source, Squeak license]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Programming > Languages > Smalltalk > Squeak > Software
PlantStudio
Tool for creating pictures of 3D plants. It simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Software > Graphics > 3D > Rendering and Modelling
StoryHarp Audioventure Interactive Fiction
Voice-operated interactive fiction including text-to-speech, sounds and music.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Games > Video Games > Adventure > Text Adventures > Design and Development > Authoring Systems
OSCOMAK: Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge
Goal: create a distributed global repository of production knowledge of past, present and future processes, materials, products.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Computers > Open Source > Open Content
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.