Increasing ODP work load ... ???

A general question/response thread:

I would just like to know how you intend to cope with the year on year doubling of the number of active web sites?

Last year Google was quoting 4 Million +, and the latest upload is showing 8 Million +.

Does this mean you are all working twice as hard as last year... reviewing the extra 4 Million sites that came to life this year?

Sorry, this is not meant to be too pessimistic, but in trying to sift through sites and find the good content, is this job not becoming twice as hard... every year?

I respect the work you all do, but for how much longer is it feasible as a manual process?

What Google actually did was increase its DATABASE (not the number of actual things on the web) of web PAGES (not sites) from four to eight BILLION (not million).

Since we list sites (not pages) that are online (not necessarily in Google) and that fulfil our criteria of unique content (which the vast majority of sites don't) ... these statistics are hardly relevant, let alone significant, from our viewpoint.

With all the tens of millions of sites on the web, my regular experience remains: the vast majority of the times when I stumble across an obviously unique site and go to list it, I find it's already listed. That hasn't changed. In other words, a random sampling of good sites (with which I'm not associated) indicates the directory remains fairly comprehensive. And so it's not likely that the overall ODP approach will need drastic changes.

<Replace "Million" = "Billion">

The project was started precisely because the founders realised with the growth of the Internet models like Yahoo's couldn't keep up.

Here's a related link:
http://www.geniac.net/odp/

I think the model is scalable, no need for everyone to work twice as fast - we just have to breed twice as fast. Note also that Google counts pages where ODP works with sites.