DMOZ, does anyone actually use them?

Save for free pagerank, dmoz/yahoo are imo useless

[crowthercm]

Perhaps it's just me but navigating DMOZ is about as easy as competing in an <snip> when you have 1 leg. Submission I know has always been incredibly slow, but with a new site prepared I can't even figure out which pages I should submit to because they all time out. In fact, over the last week 1/2 of the time dmoz.org/ itself failed to load.

Who is going to actually use a site like this to find information on?

[edited by: Marcia at 11:16 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2003]
[edit reason] Please use appropriate language befitting professsionals, please. [/edit]

[abbeyvet]

I just did, about 5 minutes ago.

Could not find what I wanted for what was a sort of ambiguous query in search of a particular site whose URL I couldn't remember in Google, found it right away in DMOZ.

[storevalley]

Who is going to actually use a site like this to find information on?

It's pretty useful when you are looking for topical directories or link partners ;)

[twoline]

Agree. The listings there are not perfect, but in cats where an editor regularly edits, they can be quite useful.

[Marcia]

I use them to find certain things. Sometimes it's impossible to find what's necessary at regular search engines. Often ODP is the best place to start looking.

Just recently - I had been using search engines for several months without coming up with some needed information. Couple of weeks ago I happened upon a category that had the EXACT information needed - that hadn't been found for almost 4 months with searching. Something critically important to my own health and well-being and I would not have known what to do about it or where to turn without having found that.

[edited by: Marcia at 11:14 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2003]

[kctipton]

>>Who is going to actually use a site like this to find information on?<<

Me. I use it all the time.

>>Save for free pagerank, dmoz/yahoo are imo useless<<

The true agenda of this thread.

[DavidP]

Oddly enough not everyone is enamoured with search engines. Some people don't like getting 10 million results for every search and filtering through false positives - especially when there in many cases there already exists a nice little menu with a solid list of relevant sites.

This is the feedback we got when we tried to find out why we were getting a significant amount of traffic coming out of dmoz. We were expecting it to deliver value as a search engine feed only but, despite rumours to the contrary, it seems that the ODP is also frequented by actual people.

[rfgdxm1]

>Me. I use it all the time.

Me too, but how typical are we? I just checked the logs of my main amateur site. That now gets about 200 unique visitors from Google alone daily. Close to 400 uniques a day counting Google partners, competing search engines, and links from other site. For this month, the logs show a whopping 2 hits from dmoz.org, and 6 from the Google directory. My site does tend to be *very* easy to find with search engines, thus people may not have to use the ODP to find it. However, if what is true for my sites is typical of all sites...

[Marcia]

Be that as it may rfg, the search engines do use ODP. And the value of a good human edited directory is an integral factor in a lot of the search engine research that's done out there - easily seen by perusing some of the research papers that are around.

There are different levels of value with different end purposes, depending on the user and what they're using it for.

No, it's not the place to go to find cheap airline tickets or to buy cheap phentermine online, but if you want reliable medical information or a credible overview and some in-depth information on a particular geographical region instead of having to drill down to past the first 1,000 results at a search engine, yes it is the place. Different strokes for different folks.

Plus, there are still a lot of people out there who ask "What's ODP" when it's mentioned. They are not a commercial enterprise and haven't done mass MARKETING to get their name out there.

Nor do they have paid affiliate programs paying for people to send clicks their way - like some of the PPC's do. :)

[crowthercm]

I just checked the logs of my main amateur site. That now gets about 200 unique visitors from Google alone daily.

Right, this is the kind of experience I've had so far as well. Basically find as many DMOZ related categories and use them to help your google rankings, which in turn can bring traffic.

>>Save for free pagerank, dmoz/yahoo are imo useless<<
The true agenda of this thread.

Yes and no, I personally never use yahoo or dmoz to search for information but I will use them to help with SEO. I prefer to use google with pluses, minues, and quotes to find the information I'm looking for. I can *usually* find what I'm looking for quite quickly. Further, with yahoo I find the alphabetical listing doesn't do a very good job to separate pages within a category. DMOZ takes far too long to load for me so I've never had a chance to consider it (although I just learned today to try using dmoz.cn instead) .

At any rate, I was really just curious what other people thought about this.

Chris

PS. <snip>if the information is useful I'll always try to keep the conversation light and enjoyable. That analogy was taken from a PG movie afterall! :P

[edited by: Marcia at 3:34 pm (utc) on Sep. 25, 2003]
[edit reason] Take it to stickymail per TOS, please. [/edit]