Google Directory

[archpedia]

How often does the Google Directory update? Is this still taken from Dmoz?

[rfgdxm1]

>How often does the Google Directory update? Is this still taken from Dmoz?

Whenever Google sees fit. The Google Directory is just a mirror of the ODP at some specific time.

[archpedia]

ok - thanks for the reply.

As big as the G is getting one would think they would develop their own directory.

[victor]

It's not *just* a mirror as they add the supposedly useful, possibly accurate, feature of view by Pagerank.

Anyone -- not just Google -- could create a directory to replace DMOZ. Many people have claimed on WMW that it would be easy to do.

Just think .... to equal DMOZ in size you need 4.5 million unique listings. Assume it takes you an average of 10 minutes per accepted site to review [that includes all management overhead and time to review sites you don't accept, so may be on the low side]

That's just 750,000 working hours, or around 4,000 people working for a year. At minimum US wage, there's change out of USD5 million to buy the hardware and get a logo designed.

The pay-off. if you create something better than DMOZ then surely Google would use it. Their links back to you would give you dozens of pages with pagerank 8 and over. That's worth USD5 million a year to anyone, surely.

[Genie]

Hate to tell you, when you have it costed to such a bargain price, but Dmoz now has over 5 million listings. And when you get to that kind of size, a huge amount of editorial time is taken up with maintenance, which you haven't costed, not to mention moving misplaced submissions to the correct category, discussion, reorganisation and all that jazz.

Of course Google could replace Dmoz if the company so wished. They have more money than they know what to do with. But their interest is focused on algorithmic search.

[victor]

I'm happy to admit that my estimate may be out by a factor of a several -- just continuing a long tradition: large IT projects almost invariably are under-estimated.

But you could save money by doing it overseas where labor costs may be 1/5th of US minimum wage.

Plus I did factor in some overheads by assuming the whole time needed for the average site is 10 minutes. that would include re-reviews and recategorisations.

That alone could be a driving force in making sites far more accessible: it would reduce the average initial review time down to about 3 minutes -- any site that couldn't convince an editor of its worth in that time would just have to wait for DMOZ.

[semiprofessional]

One could argue that in fact Google's web index is their directory - and ODP is just a seed listing and some contribution to page rankings.