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?

Comments

DMOZ was awful

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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address, because their influence on search engines was distorting the rankings and putting the old, soon-to-disappear, out-of-date site higher than the new, up-to-date one.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.

Re:They were dead 10 years ago.

[solanum]

I was an editor for a couple of sub-categories for quite a few years, starting soon after the ODP was set up. In the end I gave up though, as you say, it was massively out of date. It was a nice idea, and remains a nice idea, but is simply impractical these days. When the web was largely static it was useful. Now, not so much, sadly.

Re:I've been in the game a while...

[SpaceDave]

Pretty sure this thing never really mattered.

Oh it mattered. In the mid/late nineties it was a very important part of SEO. Back in the days when it was actually cool to be involved in SEO, DMOZ was one of the very few human-curated and trusted directory of genuine websites. It was enormously influential and surprisingly difficult to get into. There were also rules about "duplicate sites" which actually just meant "similar in concept" - they actually thought that each idea only needed one website per category. It seems incredibly quaint and naive now, but if you weren't the first website of your type listed in a category, you risked summary judgement as a copycat and excluded forever.

DMOZ was also mirrored all over the place. In the early days of Google Pagerank, link numbers were all that mattered and DMOZ gave you a large number for free. Of course DMOZ itself was high PR too. Honestly,every time I got a website into DMOZ I had a party to mark the occasion.

Of course it didn't last, nor should it have. The submission process became a joke. New submissions weren't even being considered while outdated sites kept their listings. Editing wars got petty (I was an editor for my geographic region but I eventually walked away). It was very sad to see its demise but frankly I was lucky to have been accepted into its ranks early - if I had been a few years later I would have been excluded and disadvantaged. It was a nice idea suited to a younger less mature Internet.

I was an editor there..

[Dynamoo]

I was an editor there.. in fact I still am, and over my years I achieved editall status.

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.