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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?
I've already contacted Jason at Archive Team and the community will fork and continue on at a new location. MusicMoz has agreed to host a static version until then.
If you want to help us continue the Open Directory Project, you can join at the Resource Zone: https://www.resource-zone.com/
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.