After 19 Years, DMOZ Will Close, Announces AOL 60
Its volunteer-edited web directory formed the basis for early search offerings from Netscape, AOL, and Google. But 19 years later, there's some bad news. koavf
writes:
As posted on the DMOZ homepage, the Open Directory Project's web listing will go offline on March 14, 2017. Founded in 1998 as "Gnuhoo", the human-curated directory once powered Google and served as a model for Wikipedia.
A 1998 Slashdot editorial prompted Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation to complain about how "Gnu" was used in the site's name. "We renamed GnuHoo to NewHoo," a blog post later explained, "but then Yahoo objected to the 'Hoo' (and our red letters, exclamation point, and 'comical font')." After being acquired for Netscape's "Open Directory Project," their URL became directory.mozilla.org, which was shortened to DMOZ. Search Engine Land predicts the memory of the Open Directory Project will still be kept alive by the NOODP meta tag.
The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?
A 1998 Slashdot editorial prompted Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation to complain about how "Gnu" was used in the site's name. "We renamed GnuHoo to NewHoo," a blog post later explained, "but then Yahoo objected to the 'Hoo' (and our red letters, exclamation point, and 'comical font')." After being acquired for Netscape's "Open Directory Project," their URL became directory.mozilla.org, which was shortened to DMOZ. Search Engine Land predicts the memory of the Open Directory Project will still be kept alive by the NOODP meta tag.
The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's start with eradicating people who don't know when to make a paragraph.
Archive team Go! (Score:2)
Hopefully the archive team will get a good mirror of the site.
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The DMOZ has kept downloadable archives of their entire directory. I'm sure it will be cloned by dozens of people.
It's sad to see this project go under. I used their directory data to back one of my first web projects. I also discovered a lot of resources related to my interests through it that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
Re:Archive team Go! (Score:5, Informative)
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Sadly, I never heard of DMOZ. Time to download the archive I guess.
Back then, I used to use Lycos which is 4 years older than DMOZ an a year older than Yahoo.
dmoz was awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
i ran a motorcycle related website for several years. i listed the site on dmoz. was consistently at the top of searches because of it.
i started getting phone calls from SEO companies, claiming they could get my website to the top of all searches. so i asked how they found my website. was told they searched for it. and where were they finding it? already at the top. silly people.
DMOZ was awful (Score:4, Interesting)
Some years ago, a site I was involved with was moving. Someone contacted DMOZ with a simple request not to keep listing the old address, because their influence on search engines was distorting the rankings and putting the old, soon-to-disappear, out-of-date site higher than the new, up-to-date one. That was creating significant problems for people getting the wrong information, and that in turn was causing a lot of hassle and wasted time for our volunteer organisers who had to clean up the mess. The DMOZ rep basically told us they wouldn't change anything because they were there for users not site operators. They couldn't seem to understand that what we were asking was in the interests of those users, nor why we blocked all traffic giving their site as a referrer from both sites afterwards. From our perspective, it might have been a well-intentioned idea, but it was run by people with a terrible attitude and ultimately did more harm than good.
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this is where all the dickhead editors at wikipedia cut their teeth.
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IIRC, we no longer had control of the old site at that point. Everyone's access had been transferred to the new system but the old one wasn't removed from the hosting service as quickly as it should have been for some reason, so it was just sitting there as a misleading zombie for a few weeks. That was why we wanted the link updated.
As for volunteers, lots of things on the Web are updated by volunteers (including the site I was talking about) but if you're knowingly screwing things up for other people then
Only one thought (Score:2)
The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?
Yeah... don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Seriously - this is an idea whose time past many, many years ago.
Re:Only one thought (Score:5, Insightful)
I never heard of the site until this very moment and it sounds like what Yahoo was doing in the early days. I never ever recall using Yahoo even when AltaVista and Lycos were the kings.
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I never ever recall using Yahoo even when AltaVista and Lycos were the kings.
Well, back when Hotbot was the king, Yahoo! was still a useful thing. My drinking games site was listed there and got many referrals from Yahoo.
Astalavista Baby (Score:2)
http://astalavista.box.sk/ [astalavista.box.sk]
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... whose time passed...
whose or whomse? ;)
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Seriously - this is an idea whose time past many, many years ago.
Yeah! Just like spelling and grammar and stuff! It's all, like, so yesterday! We're just in it for the kicks, dude-bro!
Boo Hoo (Score:2)
Community fork (Score:5, Informative)
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If you want to help us continue the Open Directory Project, you can join at the Resource Zone: https://www.resource-zone.com/ [resource-zone.com]
No, not really.
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Re:Community fork (Score:5, Funny)
Hey can I join your web ring?
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Pretty sure this thing never really mattered.
Oh it mattered. In the mid/late nineties it was a very important part of SEO. Back in the days when it was actually cool to be involved in SEO, DMOZ was one of the very few human-curated and trusted directory of genuine websites. It was enormously influential and surprisingly difficult to get into. There were also rules about "duplicate sites" which actually just meant "similar in concept" - they actually thought that each idea only needed one website per category. It seems incredibly quaint and naive now,
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But yeah, that's way outdated. It's not
They were dead 10 years ago. (Score:3)
Massively out of date and useless, and not accepting new volunteer help as well for the last 10 years.
A dead organization.
Re:They were dead 10 years ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was an editor for a couple of sub-categories for quite a few years, starting soon after the ODP was set up. In the end I gave up though, as you say, it was massively out of date. It was a nice idea, and remains a nice idea, but is simply impractical these days. When the web was largely static it was useful. Now, not so much, sadly.
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I miss the directory idea. Search helps you find what you are looking for but directories helps you find what you did not know existed.
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I offered to edit a few categories and took their "test" and actually took a fair amount of time doing so. They rejected me because I had a conflict of interest with websites that I didn't disclose. I was involved in one website, which I listed, but they said, "Nope." I wrote and asked, "What sites are you talking about?" They wrote back that they were under no obligation to respond to my questions. That was the last time I ever went to their site. I think the year started with a "1".
DMOZ Historical Archive (Score:2, Informative)
Will the internet suffer from not archiving DMOZ. Probably not. If possible a list of original websites registered with DMOZ within the first couple of years should be archived for internet historical reasons. I had a handful of websites registered with DMOZ. I'm old.
Back then if your website wasn't registered with DMOZ and spidered it was almost considered part of the dark web. DMOZ was a very important thing if you were a web designer. DNS wasn't as prolific back then so you actually had to register
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DNS wasn't as prolific back then so you actually had to register your site to get crawled by spiders.
How does this have anything to do with DNS?
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Was a good thing, back in the day... (Score:3)
Back in the day, when search engines were nearly useless, curated directories like DMOZ were the best way to find what you were looking for. I used it a lot, and also curated some topics.
That said, I haven't even thought about the site in over a decade. This article prompted me to check: some of my entries are unchanged after all these years. Which just goes to show how inactive DMOZ has become. I'm actually surprised that it still exists - certainly, it is no longer relevant to the modern web.
And so it ends (Score:3)
More and more of the internet is dying, siphoned away into google or facebook.
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I used to read usenet. My reader had killfiles that could exclude specific authors, subjects, content, etc. I'd skim the subject line then dive into the articles if I was interested.
Now I use an rss reader. I'd love to have anything like killfiles.
Those were the days... (Score:2)
I was an editor there.. (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a great idea when it was created, but over time the landscape of the web changed. DMOZ was founded before Wikipedia and even Google, back in the days that finding stuff was *hard*. DMOZ editors would curate lists of sites that would give a good overview of the topic, but it turns out that Wikipedia's approach to topic curation was better in the long run (and I think that many DMOZ editors are also Wikipedia editors). Directories also died a death as search engines got better, and in the end DMOZ was only really important for SEO purposes.
A long outage at the end of 2006 didn't help at all, and many editors didn't come back after that. Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions. For a long time, DMOZ was a great and useful resource. I don't think it has been the case for a while though, but the data it curated is still of value and it would be good if it could be preserved somehow.
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Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions.
The last time I logged in, apparently about 10 years ago, I was horrified at the enormous backlog of everything. And I could look at everything, because I was a metaeditor.
The last time there may have been any balance was when it was easy to become an editor and the site hadn't become a peer to Yahoo. Most editors weren't malicious, might add their own site if that's all they wanted to do, and buzz off. Of course they'd be keyword loaded crap, but there might be someone else around to fix it.
Those ha
Poor Pence (Score:1)
free ontology (Score:2)
I fantasized about stealing their category hierarchy RDF file (i.e., structure.rdf.u8.gz ) - for building a classification thingamajig of my own. Here's their short sample: http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/struct... [dmoz.org]
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oops, bad URL! This one works: https://www.dmoz.org/rdf/struc... [dmoz.org]
Sad remembering early listings for our sites (Score:2)
I had not know DMOZ was the early basis of some part of Google... Sad to see the loss of the scaffolding of the web -- but it is true that communities move on or at least individuals do. Glad Archive.org and others are making a copy of it -- but you can't as easily make an archival copy of a community.
One issue with DMOZ was that you got (at the time) at most two listings per item. The book "The Disciple of Organizing" shows instead how one can have a facet-based approach with multiple categories instead o