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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 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.
I never heard of the site until this very moment and it sounds like what Yahoo was doing in the early days. I never ever recall using Yahoo even when AltaVista and Lycos were the kings.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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/
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.
Seriously - this is an idea whose time past many, many years ago.
Yeah! Just like spelling and grammar and stuff! It's all, like, so yesterday! We're just in it for the kicks, dude-bro!
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.
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...
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.
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.
More and more of the internet is dying, siphoned away into google or facebook.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
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.
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