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Posted

A year not unusual..

 

I have received an email which discusses *the problem* from another point of view. It is pretty provocative and I'd like to see the arguements dismanteld if possible. Open for discussion:

 

DMOZ in 2005 or Is DMOZ Dead?

(a.k.a. The Open Directory Project)

By Phil Craven © 2005 (http://www.webworkshop.net)

 

The original concept of DMOZ was excellent for its time. The

DMOZ site's "About" (http://dmoz.org/about.html) page makes

these statements about the concept, and about the reasons for

the directory's creation:-

 

"Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up

useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial

staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with

submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their

directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can't

keep pace with the growth of the Internet."

 

"The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most

important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just

as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on

words through the efforts of volunteers, the Open Directory

follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the

Web."

 

But things have changed a lot since DMOZ began in the mid 1990s.

Since then, Google came along with very relevant search results,

and they were kind enough to show the other engines how to

produce such relevant results. That caused dramatic

improvements, to the extent that top search engines have been

able to provide very relevant search results for some time, and

they provide a lot more of them than DMOZ is able to do.

 

The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites

still can't keep up with submissions, but their backlogs are

small when compared with DMOZ's massive backlog. According to

reports, there are over a million site submissions that are

waiting to be reviewed, and delays of several years between

submitting a site and it being reviewed are not uncommon. The

backlog problem is so huge that many editors have redefined the

problem so that it no longer exists. To them there is no

backlog, because the submitted sites are not there to be

reviewed. They are merely a low priority pool of sites that they

can dip into if they want to, and some of them prefer to find

sites on their own.

 

Link rot (dead links) has become widespread in DMOZ through the

years, and they certainly can't "keep pace with the growth of

the Web". There isn't a single reason for the creation of DMOZ

that DMOZ itself doesn't now suffer from.

 

So how come such an excellent original concept ended up with a

directory that has the same problems that it sought to solve,

and on a much larger scale?

 

One reason is that the Web has grown at a much faster pace than

was perhaps anticipated, and the DMOZ editors simply can't keep

up. Another reason is that there are simply not enough editors

who are adding sites to the directory. At the time of writing,

the DMOZ front page (http://dmoz.org/) boasts 69,412 editors,

but that is the number of editors that they've had since the

beginning, and most of them are no longer there. A recent report

stated that there are currently about 10,000 editors who are

able to edit, and that only around 3,000 of those are active in

building the directory. The word "active" is used to describe

editors who actually edit quite often, but as little as one

edit every few months is acceptable. The word doesn't mean

"busy", although some of them are.

 

With so few people doing anything, it isn't even possible for

them to keep up with the link rot in such a huge directory, and

there's the ever increasing problem of listings that link to

topics other than what they were listed for. It simply isn't

possible for them to maintain the directory as they would like.

 

The idea of becoming "the definitive catalog of the Web" was a

fine one, but it turned out to be an impossible dream. The

purpose of DMOZ is dead. Today's search engines produce

excellent results in large quantities, and much more quickly

than drilling down into a directory to find something.

 

So is there any value at all in the DMOZ directory? As a useful

catalog of the Web, and when compared with the major search

engines, the answer is no, although a few people do find it to

be a useful research resource. For website owners, the links to

their websites that a listing in DMOZ creates are useful for

search engine ranking purposes, but even those are becoming less

useful as search engines improve, and seek to block out unwanted

duplicate content from their indexes.

 

It was a fine concept, and it looked promising for a while, but

the idea of DMOZ becoming the definitive catalog of the Web is

gone. Improvements in the search engines eclipsed its value, and

the growth rate of the Web meant that it could never achieve its

goal. It began with an excellent concept, and they gave it a

good shot, but it didn't work. The continuing growth rate of the

Web ensures that it can never work. It continues as a good

directory of a large number of web sites, but that is all. And

not many people use directories when the search engines produce

such good results, and so quickly.

  • Meta
Posted
If you want to discuss in english, please continue in one of our english language forums. This section is for discussions in german only, thank you for your cooperation.

Curlie Meta/kMeta Editor windharp

 

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  • 1 month later...
Posted

Weiter..

 

Wer weiss genau, wo der Antrag von swissmania.ch in DMOZ noch läuft? Es müssen Milliarden von Anträgen sein, wenn 1 Jahr keine Ausnahme ist, aber es werden ja bald 2 Jahre...

  • 2 years later...
Posted

Antrag den Beitrag zu löschen

 

Wie Sie sehen, sind wir nach 4 Jahren und etlichen Belehrungen und Fachmännischem Rat im Forum immer noch nicht in dmoz vertretten. Kann ich Sie deshalb bitten, diesen Thread zu löschen, da diese elendige Geschichte nun wirklich nicht in aller Öffentlichkeit festgehalten werden muss. Wir sind sehr enttäuscht vom Urteilsvermögen des ODP bzw. deren Editoren, da wir Schweizweit tatsächlich über das grösste Sortiment an Mobile Phones Ersatzteilen und Zubehör online zum Kauf anbieten. Stattdessen finden sich Seiten wie http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=buyitonline im ODP. :D

Posted

Antrag den Beitrag zu löschen

 

Wie Sie sehen, sind wir nach 4 Jahren und etlichen Belehrungen und Fachmännischem Rat im Forum immer noch nicht in dmoz vertretten. Kann ich Sie deshalb bitten, diesen Thread zu löschen, da diese elendige Geschichte nun wirklich nicht in aller Öffentlichkeit festgehalten werden muss. Wir sind sehr enttäuscht vom Urteilsvermögen des ODP bzw. deren Editoren, da wir Schweizweit tatsächlich über das grösste Sortiment an Mobile Phones Ersatzteilen und Zubehör online zum Kauf anbieten und unsere Marktanteile stetig gewachsen sind. Stattdessen finden sich Seiten wie http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=buyitonline im ODP. :D

  • 2 months later...
Posted

Löschung des Thread

 

Wie Sie sehen, sind wir nach 4 Jahren und etlichen Belehrungen und Fachmännischem Rat im Forum immer noch nicht in dmoz vertretten. Kann ich Sie deshalb bitten, diesen Thread zu löschen, da diese elendige Geschichte nun wirklich nicht in aller Öffentlichkeit festgehalten werden muss. Wir sind sehr enttäuscht vom Urteilsvermögen des ODP bzw. deren Editoren, da wir Schweizweit tatsächlich über das grösste Sortiment an Mobile Phones Ersatzteilen und Zubehör online zum Kauf anbieten und unsere Marktanteile stetig gewachsen sind. Stattdessen finden sich Seiten wie http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=buyitonline im ODP. :D

 

Wen kann man hier kontaktieren, um diesen Thread löschen zu lassen? Wie gesagt, wünschen wir in diesem Forum nicht mehr vertretten zu sein. Deshalb ersuchen wir Sie hiermit entweder den Thread zu löschen, oder die Verantwortliche Stelle dieses Forum bekannt zu geben. Ansonsten müssen wir eine Abmahnung an den Halter der Domain senden.

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