Which directory has the most lisings in it?

Yahoo, DMOZ, Zeal or Looksmart?

[sidyadav]

I submitted to Yahoo directory and got my listing in within days! But then I submitted to DMOZ and I don't know where it is now - I can't find a submission page to Zeal.

So, its pretty easy to get in Yahoo, right? But many people have trouble getting into DMOZ right?

On the DMOZ index page it says "The largest human edited directory on the web" But isn't Yahoo supposed to be that -as its much easier to get in Yahoo, so I'm guessing there are much more listings.

This maybe mentioned before at WebmasterWorld, but could any please re-clarify my question?

Sid

[brotherhood of LAN]

It's probabyl easier to get into Yahoo because some listings are paid for, so there's an incentive of them to review the sites.

DMOZ is run by volunteers, the best they can hope for is volunteers with lots of time to invest. I think they're the two main factors anyway.

For Zeal I believe you have to be a "Zealot" to get a free listing, which involves passing some sort of "test" to prove you know how to provide an adequately described listing. If you ask someone nicely that's already a zealot, sometimes they can save you that hassle ;) my 0.02 on it.

//added
DMOZ is the biggest.

[sidyadav]

yeah, I'm a 'Zealot', I passed the test! But I can't put my site because its "Commercial" and Zealots cannot put their sites into , they are edited by higher Zeal editors I think.
Its a shame, I spent 2 hours trying the test more than 4 times, and finally got it, when I realized I couldn't add my site.

Sid

[brotherhood of LAN]

Forgot to mention the looksmart element. maybe someone with experience with them can chip in. The commercial listings can get listed but it involves $.

FWIW the front page has a few threads about looksmart, i'm not really sure how much they will maintain the directory with their ppc offices closing.

[choster]

Rough estimates used to abound, but none of the directories seems to have publicized the size of its index in several years (Danny Sullivan's numbers are from 2000 and 2001).

You can come up with a rough estimate by crawling the sites (though ODP, for instance, will take several weeks to do so per robots.txt) or an even rougher one by adding the totals provided for the "real" second-level categories... which technique fails for LS/Z. To definitively say which database is the largest, you'd need to define a standard to normalize duplicate listings, sites in multiple languages, or other factors which may skew the results.

As of this morning (US Eastern Time), ODP's official database (which excludes editor bookmarks and test categories) has approximately 2.78 million English language sites and 1.23 million non-English language sites listed. These numbers can be confirmed by counting the listings in the weekly RDF dump.

While I have no independent means to confirm this, I am quite certain that business and commercial listings are better represented in Yahoo, whereas recreational and educational listings are better maintained in the ODP.

[windharp]

The approximate number of ODP listings can easily be seen on the main page. The number wasn't changed for some time but now it does reflect a count of the sites in the last succesfull RDF (At least that is my understanding of the process that updates the number) which obviously was 4,031,427 :-)

Site counts of the World categories can be seen on [et.com.mx...] for those who are interested.

[Edit - Added the following]

I have no numbers to compare the whole directories, but for the german part I have some more information, about a week old now:

ODP: 349668
web.de: 390746 (taken from their own statistics)
de.yahoo.com: 492700 (adding their counts for all their main categories)

But AFAIK unlike the ODP the others count categories and @links, too.

[IITian]

Looked at the daily number of sites added to the Yahoo directory, for this month, and the numbers were (rounded to nearest 10)

390, 350, 350, 230, 250, 170, 180, 350, 310, 430, 250, 350, 310, 300, 290

(Three weeks' data - from 1st to 19th - Saturdays and Sundays are excluded since almost nothing gets added those days.)

Median number is about 310 per day or about 1500 per week or about 80,000 sites annually. I believe that DMOZ is growing at a much faster pace - more than 500,000 sites a year!

For businesses that are willing to pay $300/year, Yahoo definitely is better (in speed and chance of inclusion)than DMOZ but for the rest of us - small businesses, non-profits, personal sites - chance of getting listed in the Yahoo directory seems to be quite small.

In the business & commerce category Yahoo claims to list about 730,000 sites. As a rough guide for the total number including all categories, multiplying this number by 2, I get about 1.5 million - a smaller number than about 4 million of DMOZ.

[g1smd]

The ODP is probably about 4 to 5 times bigger than Yahoo and is also (currently) growing at at least 5 to 8 times the speed of Yahoo.

[sidyadav]

I'm not sure if its just me, but DMOZ is slow on my connection (On a dial up; about 5 secs for everypage) and Yahoo is pretty fast (2-3 secs on everypage)

Sid

[g1smd]

Try one of the many ODP mirrors, or other downstream data users.

[hutcheson]

When comparing the size of the ODP and Yahoo, another factor to be considered: Yahoo is now apparently fully geocoded, so that many single Yahoo listings serve the same purpose as two ODP listings (and sometimes both ODP listings are actually present, sometimes only one of them is.)

We've never gotten a really good horse-apples and mock-oranges size comparision, for all the reasons Choster gives -- most of which relatively exaggerate the ODP's size, so WE don't want to use them, since we're sure we're honestly the largest, and we don't want to be accused of stacking the deck by a dishonest comparision.

[DRGather]

Regarding Zeal... just pay for the Looksmart listing. That will get you into Zeal as well in most cases. It takes about a month to 6 weeks... at least in my case. It also tags your listing as paid and the source... but who cares?

[nalavanje]

Sidyadav you said you posted your site to Yahoo and got listed within days.
Did you pay for the listing or not?
Is the site you submitted commercial site?

[sidyadav]

Sidyadav you said you posted your site to Yahoo and got listed within days.

yep. Within about a week or so.

Did you pay for the listing or not?

Nope, Free "bulk" submission.

Is the site you submitted commercial site?

Well, you could say that.

Getting into Yahoo is really easy for me, I own about 3 "working" sites, and each of them are listed in Yahoo, not sure about DMOZ though.

Sid

[martinibuster]

>>Regarding Zeal... just pay for the Looksmart listing.

In Sid's situation, the wise advice is "No freaking way."

A LS listing is pay per click and many of their new partners are so called "contextual" channels- meaning adware.

AFAIK, Zeal listings aren't included with all partners, so the value of even a Zeal listing has become worth less, especially since MSN is dropping LS/Zeal.

[DRGather]

In Sid's situation, the wise advice is "No freaking way."

A LS listing is pay per click and many of their new partners are so called "contextual" channels- meaning adware.

AFAIK, Zeal listings aren't included with all partners, so the value of even a Zeal listing has become worth less, especially since MSN is dropping LS/Zeal.

Excellent point and you're abosolutely right. The traffic I get from Looksmart is pretty pathetic to be honest. However, it is a solution to his question about how to get into Zeal. *shrug*... depends on how you're willing to get in honestly.

I'm not even sure a Zeal listing will help at all anyway, as you stated. Nobody else uses them really and it's not like DMOZ which is a live, direct HTML link to your site (Thereby increasing PR and link pop). They use redirect jump scripts to your site which.... eh... there's still question in my mind about whether these will help you at all aside from somebody stumbling onto your site through the directory itself.