hutcheson - 11:31 pm on Mar 27, 2004 (gmt 0)

If you think of search results as divided into the very competitive, normal, esotoric, and downright obscure, it's easy to see that the influence of human-refereed directories varies by category.

In the competitive (which is where most regulars here focus), nothing can save the results from being 99% spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam. And it's easy to see why the doorway affiliatemeisters are perturbed, concerned, and even angry at anything that stands out to a human eye. But it's petty and shortsighted to focus on the ODP, since all directories have that effect. And in any case, the real competition here is paid inclusion.

In the normal searches, directories have a slightly beneficial effect.

In the esoteric searches, the directories make the difference between high-quality results and zillions of spamazon-spamfiliate pages. (This is where volunteer ODP editors tend to hang out, and it shows -- and since it shoes, they tend to focus here.) This also explains why webmarketroids are frustrated at the apparent indifference of the volunteers, and the volunteers, seeing the difference they make where a difference can be made, are indifferent to the frustration.

In the downright obscure searches, the search engines do all right by themselves. Only the psychopathically vicious spamsters are optimizing for keyword sets with only a few dozen hits (and there are fortunately very few of them.)