moftary - 1:33 am on Aug 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

so we are seeking refuge in your thread

reseller, I am a refugee muself :)

In many areas, directories became little more than intrusive middlemen with little value added.

Correction: with NO value added, yes when I search for something in a certain engine I don't like to find any directory results nor any other searching engine results. But believe it or not, not all people are just like you and me. I have a tracker installed on my web directory, and it shows that visitors either continue their navigation from the page they landed on from google, or just find a website link (resource) for the information/service/product they are seeking, or finally they just click a relevant adsense ad.

So, believe it or not, web directories are useful for most of the users. Besides.. when you search on google for something you get a list of results with *snippits*, are you forced to click on the listing? or are you too blind to note that the listing is irrelevent to your search?

That said, I dont care nor mind if google removed all unique directories from its serps. I dont care nor mind if it removed all ODP clones or all directories that are basically seeded with ODP data. What I care, and what bugs me the most, is that so far major ODP clones (opera, alexa, etc..) as well as minor ODP clones still exist in google serps.

Sorry for such long post.

~moftary