Category Default Sorting

I feel a good way to improve the current order of the listings in all the DMOZ categories would be to use the same method as Google, i.e Sort by Page Rank.

Presently, having all sorted alphabetically would assume the browser knows the name of a site they want. If this were the case then I doubt they would even use the directory.

Googles Page Rank order would make the most popular sites float to the top.

Dave

And how would we do that, considering that we are not Google and do not have access to their Page Rank data? -- Foe

I don't know, I'm only making the suggestion to try and help make DMOZ better. I didn't realize I was also expected to supply the method?

Dave

Dave, there are only three levels of ranking within an ODP category - the top of the list comes the option "cool" sites which an editor flags - you can read more about that in the guidelines.

Then there are the other sites, sorted alphabetically (sort of - there is some algorithm in there to stop people submitting "AAAAA Limos" in order to be able to get to the top of the list).

The bottom of the list come the sites which have a date relevance - thinks like newspaper articles or reports.

This is very deliberate and by design - we're allowing the user to select the sites they think are relevant, based on the category and the description provided (which is why we are so picky about what goes in the description. The user whould be able to tell from these whether the site is of interest to them or not.

Also, there is an attempt, if a list gets overly large, to subdivide into other subcategories, providing a logical breakdown, rather than some ranking. That way the user can get to the information they want, rather than using some sort of ranking algorithm.

I am betting that more people use directory.google.com in a day than dmoz.org sees in a week.

The ODP site at dmoz.org is mainly used by anxious webmasters, not so much the surfing general public.

Hi Alucard

Dave, there are only three levels of ranking within an ODP category - the top of the list comes the option "cool" sites which an editor flags - you can read more about that in the guidelines.

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In the categories under spreadsheets I only see all sorted in alpha order?

This is very deliberate and by design - we're allowing the user to select the sites they think are relevant, based on the category amd the description provided (which is why we are so picky about what goes in the description. The user whould be able to tell from these whether the site is of interest to them or not.

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Sorry, don't get what you mean? How are users determining the order the listings are shown?

Giz,

possibly true, but this might be one of many reasons why. Besides, DMOZ is not supposed to be catered to webmasters, but rather to users.

Dave

In the categories under spreadsheets I only see all sorted in alpha order?

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That would be because no editor has felt that any site has reached the requirements for being designated as "cool" and there are no time-oriented articles in there. This leaves all sites ranked euqally (in essence, no rank)

Sorry, don't get what you mean? How are users determining the order the listings are shown?

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No, I'm sorry - I wasn't clear. The point is we don't use an algorithm to decide in which order to present sites to a user - we don't rank "relevance" because the general idea is that the reviewing editor feels that the site is useful for that category. We do not ask them to rank beyond this in any way, as this would be just one editor's opinion. We would rather give the user enough information about the sites for THEM to decide what is relevant for their needs.

Most other directories that I have looked at do the same, unless they give certain paying sites a top listing, which would definitely be against the ODP charter, and the reason for its existence.

Hopefully this makes more sense.

Speaking as user, I use directory.google.com only if I really don't know anything about the topic I'm searching for information about. But if I 'm looking for, say, information on my favourite band or a disease, I use the ODP because I find it hard to find the sites that I might actually want to visit first in the mess of Google's ranking -- higher ranking sites aren't necessarily the best sites on the subject, just the ones with better PR (and probably SEO). In general, I use Google's search to get the Google directory category path for whatever I'm looking for and then I go right from there to the ODP category.

Googles Page Rank order would make the most popular sites float to the top.

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That's useful in some cases, which is why I use Google's directory (despite it being months out of date at times), and not in others, which is why I use DMOZ (ditto).

Compare, for example:
Dmoz page which is sorted by date, so I can easily read articles in order of publication, or skip to the most recent.

with:
Google page which is sorted by PageRank (so I can see Google's best guess of the most relevant) or alphabetically, but does not offer a date-of-publication order.

If Google added a sort-by-date, they'd be adding a really valuable facility to ther downstream copy of the OPD RDF. But I could see them running into trouble with SERPS-spammers who'd make endless trival changes just to have the latest datestamp.

DMOZ is offering date-of-publication or date-of-event, not date-of-web-page-update, so it is way less suspectible to that sort of spamming even in categories that order by date,

Thamks Alucard, that explains it well.

FOE, your name is very apt

Sunanda, the Google directory already offers the ability to sort by date. This what I hoping DMOZ could offer. Agreed that the page rank is far from perfect, but I believe it to be better than an alpha sort in most cases.

Dave

this might be one of many reasons why.

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Actully, http://dmoz.org/ is not intended to be a focus of end-user directory browsing. The main product is the downloadable directory RDF dump. And downstream data users, like the Google Directory, are free to order the listings as they see fit.

I didn't realize I was also expected to supply the method?

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Sorry. I wasn't expecting an answer; it was a rhetorical question.

We do have a link from our directory pages to Googles' directory pages (the green dot in the bottom right-hand corner) to make it easy to compare the two. I don't see us going any farther than that, as Google is rather unlikely to share their data with us -- Foe

As sfromis notes, the ODP is the directory, not the presentation. Think AFP news wire, or the National Weather Service feed, or the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization crop database-- some people want to go to the source, but most consume the information after it has been processed and rearranged into something more useful and/or more attractive.