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Open Directory Project
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The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. Like directories on for-profit sites, people actually categorize the websites included in the directory. Unlike the commercial sites, this directory is constructed and maintained by a vast, global army of volunteer editors. These "net citizens" can each organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content. Essential aspects include
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A short definition of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is: “the most important directory on the Web”. If you add “human edited” to the short definition, you’ve got it all. However, this “human edited” tag doesn’t say it all. The “humans” are volunteers. Volunteering means you don’t get paid for what you do, you do it for free. On occasion, these volunteers don’t have the time to do their job, or just don’t want to.
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By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the number of URLs in the Open Directory surpassed the number of URLs in the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000 with about 1.6 million URLs. ODP achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001 and four million on December 3, 2003.
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In two short years, the Open Directory Project has grown from a scrappy grassroots movement to a bona fide Web powerhouse. Though the challenges it faced in its formative years were certainly daunting, the ODP must now contend with two new major challenges to continue to survive and thrive. The first challenge will be maintaining its autonomy now that it is part of the huge AOL-Time Warner complex. The preliminary signs are encouraging: AOL has integrated ODP data into its own search service with impressive results. Nonetheless, political, financial, and marketplace pressures may have a disruptive effect on the current ODP structure.
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The Open Directory Project is, as its name implies, an Internet directory. As such, it requires submission to the appropriate category for indexing from a volunteer editor. There is no other source of entry to DMOZ except through the human editing process. Google,Yahoo Search, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves are search engines which add sites for indexing into their database electronically. Submission of a site to a search engine is not required, or even recommended.
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The Open Directory Project was started as an alternative to Yahoo! and machine-based search engines. Their mission statement is "Humans do it better." It has a hierarchical network of categories, with volunteer editors who review sites for each category level. There are sixteen major category levels: arts and entertainment, business, computing and Internet, games, health and fitness, news, recreation, reference, regional, science and technology, shopping, society and lifestyles, sports, and World (in German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Indonesian) The Open Directory is used as the directory service for a number of search engines and sites, including AOL, Netscape, Lycos, Hotbot, All the Web (Fast), Northern Light, and others.
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Open Directory Project