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I know ODP was heavily influenced from the beginning by volunteer editors eager to place their own sites but it seemed these inexperienced and eager people just added to the excitement. It seems now the sway of the top level editors has changed the entire character of this once dynamic project. This has held true in commercial categories I followed. My own self interest caused me to join, leave and now disregard this once important directory.
I don't think ODP can continue in any importance without significant COMMERCIAL categories and the spamming involved certainly makes them insignificant. Google's emphasis on this directory is still strong, attracting and creating opportunity for ever newer spamming techniques to ODP and I wonder, when Google casts it aside, if it will soon die.
Lets say ODP continues to get huge numbers of submissions for sites wanting a boost in Google rankings. The ODP gets to a point where it can never catch up... ever. Editor drain continues and the ODP machine basically just stops.
Does Google then say "ODP is old and stale, no longer of value to us" and move off someplace else, turning their back on a huge unmanageable mess that has arisen largely because of the way Google wants to deliver web data.
Just some idle "what if.."
I have been waiting to get a site of mine in this category for three months: [dmoz.org...] Home_Health/Home_Care/Service_Providers/Non-Medical/This category has not been updated since July 2002!
I like the ODP, but to say that people aren't waiting....might be stretching it a bit.
there is no editor for that category..or for categories 2 levels up...
you may want to apply and become the editor of it... you just need to find a few more site in addition to yours to add. that and write proper descriptions.
i became the editor of a small category just so i can build up edits if i ever want to move to a larger one. i may have had check out 3 applications since i started.
In particular :
Instead of fighting the explosive growth of the Internet, the Open Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself.
By sharing the ODP database with other "competing" systems, ODP clearly is forging to deliver in their goal. So, althought both are fruits, from this particular angle, one is a banana and the other is a pear.
I happen to like both of them.
Wow. talk about a new taboo topic, politics, religion, sex, and Google/DMOZ...
Lets say ODP continues to get huge numbers of submissions for sites wanting a boost in Google rankings. The ODP gets to a point where it can never catch up... ever. Editor drain continues and the ODP machine basically just stops.
A radical way to dal with the huge amount of unreviewed sites would be just to delete the whole lot, or to auto-expire submissions after (say) 6 months. In some parts of the directory there is several years of cruft.
About the age of submissions.. there are unreviewed sites dating back several years, a few to 1999. But equally as well, you may get your site accepted the same day. I find that the average for MY submissions is a couple of weeks, but with a few exceptions where is takes much longer.
I dug out the *original* announcement for the ODP back in the days it was called Gnuhoo way back in the dark ages of June 1998 (you can find it easily enough on Google Groups) and the mission statement is just as relevant today as it was then.
It is ODP that is causing problems for Google.
As it becomes more and more outdated and backlogged, it becomes less and less useful to Google. It is also getting to the point where it is hurting the credibility of Google.
ODP has been imploding for over a year now, I think it is just a matter of time before something drastic happens. What that might be, I have no idea, but it could range anywhere from Google dropping it to AOL selling it off to someone.
Just my $.02.
Look, Google spiders the ODP quite regularly, so sites listed at dmoz.org find their way to www.google.com quite quickly. It is only directory.google.com that hasn't been updated, and usage of that is far lower than the Google search engine.
Reviewing every single site submission that needs to be transferred to another category or completely rewritten to take the description out of the title and make it reasonably conform to the directory guidelines must take an awful lot of editors time that could be better utilized listing subnmissions that follow the guidelines.
If it was known that this was the case and it certianly is currently not, the deluge of submissions due in part to Google using ODP data might suddenly improve dramatically if those submissions that completely ignored the guidelines just dropped automatically from the queue and submitters were made aware of this process.
If it was actually 4 million. If you consider that there are a lot of duplicate sites, outdated entries, and millions in backlog it sounds a lot less impressive.
Your argument is rather specious anyway - let's rephrase that: "Are you saying that a Phone book with 4 million names that is 2+ years out of date is useless?"
Not useless - but a whole bunch less usefull than an up to date one.
I love ODP, free and easy to access.
I sometimes use it for looking up stuff, just now im borrowing some of its information :)
Nice clean fast loading pages, people helping the web out, very nice place. Just my IMO,
i love the dmoz as directory (i.e. where do you get all writes of a country listed from a to z elsewhere?) and google as a search engine for the web. what's the prob. even google does not find everything everytime and is spammed - does this prevent anyone here from using google?
One comment here. While there definitely are some 2 year old greens laying around at the ODP, that doesn't exactly mean that the ODP is years out of date. A large number of cats are well maintained by active editors and have no backlog of greens. My cat space as an editor has about 5,000 listed sites, and a grand total of 4 greens when I logged out today because I am leaving them hoping a lower editor will get around to them soon. A lot of other editors have cats with no or few greens. Offhand I have no clue what areas are the most backlogged with greens. However, my guess is that it is in the commercial cats that are heavily spammed, and that isn't what most ODP users care about.
Quite true. In fact one of the major problems with ODP is the inconsistency across subjects. When I was with ODP it was not unusual to find numerous applications that were over 3 years old in some categories, while others were only a couple of weeks behind. Unfortunately, only the most interesting (to editors) categories are up to date. Many others are well over a year behind. Even now, in 2003, there are entries from as far back as 1999.
2 year old greens laying around
And just because it is in the unreviewed queue doesn't mean it is unreviewed.
I have several submissions per category that don't have enough website to be worth listing -- in some cases the site is a single page with maybe a sentence of useful info and a "coming soon" or "under construction" message.
I leave them in unreviewed and check them every couple of months. Some have been like that a long time.
Add those sorts of unreviewed to the duplicate spam submissions that editors get in more commercial cats, and we have maybe counted a good proportion of the raw unreviewed sites.
The value of the ODP to website promoters is quite real: but it is of no consequence whatever to the ODP or to Google, and you can't expect either one of them to be making decisions based on that (except, of course, considering that impatient promoters would be willing to buy AdWords or the AOL equivalent).
As for unpredictable and indefinite delays in reviews, they are both a consequence of the ODP "volunteer organization" (if that's not an oxymoron) and its most valuable tool in the fight against spam. It is inevitable that directories favor large, stable sites; while the ODP happily lists small sites, shortlived or bait-and-switch sites are a waste of effort and degrade the directory's quality (unlike unlisted sites, which do NOT). Letting submitters know that a shortlived site may not be reviewed during its lifetime is a bit of deterrent. Letting baiters know that they may not be able to set the hook for months is a deterrent -- these slimes do not like planning for the long term. And not reviewing an ephemeral site until it's dead takes much less effort than reviewing it, categorizing it, listing it, and then immediately removing it.
So the long queues can be seen as a win-win-win situation. It's SHORT queues that tell us we're not capturing the target audience.
You ARE kidding, right?
You are now saying that the months and even years of delay in processing ODP submissions is a GOOD thing because it reduces spam?
If ODP was a commercial organization, or even a non profit one, it would go broke in a matter of weeks.
Volunteer organizations unfortunately have the inertia to do nothing new, and ODP is no different. There is plenty of work to be done but what it requires is people to do it, and people who will persevere in attempting to do it. More webmasters need to be less selfish and understand that if they have quality sites that they have a responsibility to give back to the ODP if they expect it to be around to give them any (deserved) benefit.
Policies should not be made based on spam. They should be made based on getting users the good content submitted by webmasters in a timely fashion. Spam is an editors problem, it should not be made into a users or submitters problem. There should never be a reason for that except not enough editor person-power.
Fact is, that the ODP is neither a commercial organization nor a non-profit one. Besides, I personally know both commercial organizations and non-profit ones dedicated to maintaining archives of "things" where the main job involved is improving the archive structure/classification, not adding new items to the archive.
>> Webmasters are the lifeblood of the ODP.
Yes and no. Web sites are the lifeblood of the ODP. ODP editors do not have to (and often don't) rely on submissions to build the directory. Again, ODP reference target is the final user, not webmasters wanting to get in.
>> they have a responsibility to give back to the ODP if they expect it to be around to give them any (deserved) benefit
Wrong reciprocal target here. Webmasters have a responsibility to build content-rich sites for the users, not for the ODP, which has the same responsibility (making good sites available) and target (the final user). There's no deserved benefit webmasters should expect from the ODP. That is, webmasters shouldn't build quality sites to get into the ODP, and ODP editors shouldn't review sites to give something back to webmasters.
This doesn't mean that the ODP and webmasters couldn't work together to make the web a better place. On the opposite, being the target and the final purpose the same (or I should say when the target and the final purpose are actually the same), there's a lot to do: good suggestions and constructive criticism from either part can help the other part improving the quality of both the product (quality sites) and service (organizing quality sites and making them available). It's the relationship among the two players that's often misinterpreted, when either one becomes the target/purpose of the other.
But that again is my point. Webmasters create content. They are the lifeblood of ODP. Whether they submit them or not is not really relevant.
ODP is about content, and the content creators are the key players. Without content their is nothing for ODP to list, or for users to use. "Submitters" are a whole different class of people (even though there is overlap).
True, but in a few years of editing, my experience has been that the vast majority of submitted sites do not provide much in the way of useful content. I don't think that I am alone when I say that most of the good sites that I've listed were those that I've found myself, not those found in the submissions queue.
If I edit one category in the ODP, I will have searched for and added sites to enhance the usefulness of the category that I maintain. The chances are that your submitted site will do far more for you, if added, than it will for the usefulness of the category.
The largest unreviewed queues are in categories that few people, other than webmasters trying to sell a product, are interested in. If I want to buy a widget, there are other, perfectly good widget sites listed; one more will help you, if you're trying to sell widgets, but it probably won't enhance the value of the category significantly.
>> Unfortunately, only the most interesting (to editors) categories are up to date. <<
As the ODP derives its editor pool from the wider arena of Internet users, categories that are not interesting to ODP editors are probably ones that there is not much of a demand for. If a lot of people were interested in the category, one of them would apply to edit it.
Not really true. In fact, about the only real customer that ODP has is Google and a few other SE's or pseudo-SE's that use ODP results.
Actual direct users of ODP are so rare as to be almost non-existant. Looking over the logs of our sites, I would guess that maybe (at most) we get 1 in 10,000 directly from the ODP directory (it is #246 on the list of referring sites). The same can be said for the Yahoo directory - almost nobody uses it directly.
Directories have become notoriously bloated with low-quality sites, and ODP is the worst of them. There is pretty much no such thing as a quality standard for being listed in ODP - any content at all, and you can get listed. This makes it virtually worthless for anyone actually trying to use it, since they have to dig through a pile of garbage to find what they are looking for.
Without the filtering and PR provided by Google, ODP would be irrelevant in its current condition.
That is half true. There are also tons of unreviewed in many "less than mainstream" categories. This includes all the "alternative" science (or pseudo-science) sites, a huge portion of the Health related sites, and many niche categories.
Even categories that you would think would have plenty of volunteers, like many of the hard science and computer cats have areas that have not been updated for months.
Yes, it is slow getting published, but if webmasters would spend more time building out quality sites with unique high quality content and less time clogging the submission queue, this would work itself out. I place far more blame on those jamming us up with bad submissions than the volunteers who are trying to clean things out.
Two days ago I was spammed by 32 affiliate link submissions. Want better service? Police yourselves and raise the quality on what you create and submit. Don't blame the ODP, blame those amongst you who have created the problem. Do a better job so that you can help us do a better job.
[edited by: Laisha at 8:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2003]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
>Not really true. In fact, about the only real customer that ODP has is Google and a few other SE's or pseudo-SE's that use ODP results.
15 second economics lesson:
ODP = "producer"
Google, Alexa, AOL = "distributors"
Directory-using public = "customers" and "consumers"
There are other CONSUMERS, we know: but they aren't our CUSTOMERS.
Once you've paid for your gallon of milk at the grocery, they don't care whom you share it with. We bottle the milk, guaranteed fit for human consumption; it's none of our concern if your cat ends up drinking 7 pints of it. And we certainly won't change the bottling process so the cat likes it better.
And that attitude is precisely the problem with ODP.
If I was a milk producer, and found out that my customers don't like the way my milk is bottled, I would find out why and change things to satisfy my customers.
The problem is that ODP is still walking with dinosaurs...
It's a matter of perspective, I suppose. To the person who is looking for the content that you would have us exclude, it's a plus. For the person who wants their site to be all alone in the category, it's a minus. Our concern is for the person looking for content, not for the webmaster who would exclude all content but their own.
Fair enough. But oh, so irrelevant!
Submitters are not our customers, they are voluntary helpers. Webmasters are not our customers. We are yours. And all that you say about listening to your customers: if you want to be listed by your customer, you'd better be listening!
SURFERS are OUR customers. Our ONLY customers. (Think of us as people with a passion for endangered species, if you wish: the ecologists of the internet. Yeah, I think I even like it.)
And surfer complaints get handled _fast_. Don't take my word for it. Go back through these forums and look at the threads "xxx.com used to be a kid's party game site, now it's dead (or hardcore porn). On the average, within six hours, there'll be another post saying "xxx.com is gone now." That's no accident: several of us visit these forums primarily to find out about (and take care of) quality issues like that.
We love our customers. Our suppliers -- well, we're always ready to switch if something better comes along. That's how we can best serve our customers.
