RIP DMOZ: The Open Directory Project is closing

[bill]

[dmoz.org...]

RIP Dmoz: The Open Directory Project is closing [searchengineland.com]

DMOZ — The Open Directory Project that uses human editors to organize web sites — is closing. It marks the end of a time when humans, rather than machines, tried to organize the web.

The announcement came via a notice that’s now showing on the home page of the DMOZ site, saying it will close as of March 14, 2017

[glakes]

The DMOZ closure should serve as an example for those that think getting directory links are valuable and the most important part of SEO. To this day I still get spam from third world countries promoting their directory SEO services. I wish those places would close too...

[jmccormac]

the web is already too big to search.

No. This is a common misconception of people outside the business of Search. The web is actually a lot smaller than it seems. People outside the web business see that there's over 126 million .COM domains registered and assume that that means 126 million .COM websites. It doesn't. The .COM web usage percentage is about 30%. That's the real core of .COM websites excluding the PPC parked/Holding Pages and redirects. Most sites are brochureware sites with less than 100 pages. Then you've got the deep sites like Facebook and others which have billions of pages in depth. But there's a far more important problem with the web: a lot of it keeps disappearing.

Google's big problem is that it has the old "spider everything and hope the algorithm provides good results" approach. The limiting factor with that is the algorithm and the kludgefest that Google's algorithm has become has shown the inability of the people there to cope with what is really a simple problem.

The more important problem is that the renewal rates in some TLDs like .COM has fallen from the 70%+ rate in 2004 or so to around 50%. That means that approximately half of the domains that were registered on this day last year may not be renewed this year and any sites on them will be gone. Due to a kind of web necrosis, search engine indexes may, at any given time, have results for sites that no longer exist. And this is before getting to the tricky problem of webspam.

Curated directories and link checking would go a long way towards solving some of Google's fatal flaws but perhaps the time for large scale directories like Dmoz has passed unless Jimbo Wales would be interested in taking over Dmoz and making it part of Wikipedia. :) Just think of the turf wars.

Regards...jmcc

[ChanandlerBong]

The data will probably live on but there may be no further updates.

oh no, what will we do without those timely updates.? :o)

my category, which I'm in, hasn't altered a thing in 8 years...half the links give 404s.

DMOZ was always 5 great links, 5 obvious ones missing and 5 that were there and never should have been - and only were because the owner knew the editor or was the editor!

Had its time, but that stopped being the case, seriously, in about 2003.

[Dimitri]

I tried once to apply as an editor, but never get answers (neither approved, nor rejected). I've also been reporting broken links, and especially when links were redirecting to sites totally different*, but no one ever corrected them.

* I bet there was a business of acquiring sites listed at dmoz, for the purpose of redirecting to another site.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>acquiring sites listed at dmoz

It was a favoured place to quickly gather a big list of domains that knowingly had at least one good backlink, which makes the domain at least worth the registration fee.

[aristotle]

Hasn't it been slowly dying for a long time?

[jambam]

Two simple things killed dmoz.

1.Couldnt scale up
2.editors who just were there to make money or stop compititors.

[blend27]

I got my main ecom site into dmoz over a decade ago. Proper category, waited I think close to a year after it was first submitted to get in after reaching out to one of the editors here at WebmasterWorld.

For me it was:

PROS: Constant barrage of scrapers trying to parse DMOZ RDF getting caught, and blocked - me blocking hosting ranges where they would come from.

CONS: Never made a single sale to visitors from DMOZ due to an extremely low human traffic from that site, almost none existent. In fact, the way I found out that the same site was taken out from the category about 8 month ago was when odp-checker-bot stopped visiting and human visitors from INDIA and Philippines, with DMOZ referrer, stopped asking for links.

[edited by: blend27 at 12:06 pm (utc) on Mar 3, 2017]

[Dimitri]

As usual, a good idea being perverted by money interest.

[smilie]

Money corrupts everything.

Look at G.

[IanCP]

True, always so true.

[ambt]

This is sad. I haven't used it myself for ages, but it's just sad whenever a good site has to close.

[Essex_boy]

Odd web is dying out...

[cpollett]

It's sad to hear its disappearing. I was an editor of a minor sub category but would only log in every two-three months. When I heard, I downloaded their most recent RDF dump. I had previously made searchable indexes from their data using my open source search engine software.

[edited by: phranque at 2:46 am (utc) on Mar 6, 2017]
[edit reason] see forum Charter [/edit]

[beren]

Now that it's over, I wonder if we can get a definitive account of the dysfunctional management culture and secrecy code that grew up there. In particular, we have heard for years of editors accepting money for listings, even though ODP always denied it. I wonder if there was truth to these rumors or they are urban legends.


I was a low-level editor for a while, the only editor in one category. It was an industrial category - B2B stuff. I probably processed 600 to 700 sites - some I admitted but most I diverted to what I thought were more appropriate categories for the editors there to decide. I rejected some entries, too, but probably under 30 percent.

However, nobody even once offered me money.

Did I do a good job? By the standards of a real job, no. I didn't have the time to process the hundreds of sites in the que, with dozens more submitted every month. The category was understaffed. I suspect that was true in a lot of the directory.


I am not making excuses for ODP. It certainly had a screwed-up management culture - like the Mafia or something. I lost all faith in them when a meta editor admitted here on webmasterworld that they accepted fewer than 20 percent of applications to be editor. These were volunteer jobs in an organization that was understaffed. They were not in a position to be turning people away. I guess they got some ego boost by turning people down.

[robzilla]

I guess they got some ego boost by turning people down.

I think they had to assume the majority of applications came from people who were just trying to get their own sites listed. I'm not ashamed to admit I once slipped through the cracks and became editor of a small niche category for the same reason. I didn't abuse that position in any way except to expedite my own submission, but many others doubtlessly have, so they had very good reason to be suspicious of applications. Doomed from the start, you could say. Perhaps a public community approach (a la StackExchange) would have worked better in the long term.

[hyperkik]

In particular, we have heard for years of editors accepting money for listings, even though ODP always denied it.

The FAQ for the DMOZ public report of abuse form lists, as one form of abuse, "Editors accepting bribes. We have no tolerance whatsoever for any bribery attempts. All submissions to the Directory are completely free; any editor found to be accepting bribes will be removed." I don't personally recall the ODP ever denying that it was a problem.

[alaney2k]

Problems with management. I know about that. It all seemed to be fine, then a hierarchy developed and it seemed that those higher up did nothing more than criticise and make it unappealing to contribute. I gave up on it long ago. I am actually surprised it has hung on this long. I edit on Wikipedia and it is a much better experience even with the occasional "edit war."

[jmccormac]

Just checked for the RDFs. Site is officially closed. RIP Dmoz.

Regards...jmcc