rogerd - 7:16 pm on Jul 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

>>Why doesn't a new and improved competitor to DMOZ arise?

I think the biggest reason is the lack of a compelling business justification for such an effort. If human-edited directories were wildly profitable, someone would get some venture capital, hire a bunch of humans, and create one.

Why isn't such a directory profitable when you can monetize popular content relatively easily? Fundamentally, a directory is not the most useful way for users to find websites. If it was, DMOZ, the Google directory, the Yahoo directory, and many others would see lots of traffic. In fact, they are all marginal compared to the big Web search engines.

While the hiearchical structure can be useful for certain kinds of searches, it also tends to pigeonhole sites. That may be fine for some small, single-purpose sites, but doesn't work well for big sites with diverse content that operate across many geographic locations. For those sites, a directory builder must either create a bazillion listings for that site (generally not good) or list it under a few appropriate categories and skip the rest(problematic for searchers).

The volunteer aspect of DMOZ may be limiting, but only because of the highly controlled editor selection process. Wikipedia shows that massive volunteer efforts can be made to work. If the directory concept was a huge winner, we'd have a huge Directopedia by now. We don't. So I wouldn't blame DMOZ's shortcomings on being a volunteer effort.

The closest thing to a DMOZ competitor (from a user benefit standpoint) is Mahalo, the "human edited search engine." The concept is different than DMOZ, but at least in part the user benefit is the same - specific topics with the best editor-reviewed sites listed. Whether building and maintaining such a tool is a valid business concept remains to be seen.