suggestion on DMOZ weighting system

B

Banbin

I'm not sure if it's appproriate but I give it below:

The DMOZ category structure at the moment is just a category. Websites in a same category are simply listed according to the time when it was approved. From the category, we don't know which one is weighted highly. It still leaves us a hard decision on which one we should pay a visit to.

The problem is less obvious when they are just small category with limited amount of websites. But when the catoegory grows, this will a problem which we have to take a serious look at.

Here I give a possible solution. And I hope some of project involvers can make comments on it, and most importantly, further the idea.

We may set a weighting system that, when anyone clicks on the website given at the category once, the weighting system will record the IP and add one point to this website. clicks from the same IP can only be counted as "one point".

If a website gets the highest clicking point, the website at the category will automatically float to the top of the list.

I know some Chinese category websites have already realized this. I hope my suggestion can be of any assistance to DMOZ.
 
windharp

windharp

Meta/kMeta
Curlie Meta
Joined
Apr 30, 2002
Messages
9,204
Nice idea, but not fully compatible with the ODP idea. Some thoughts on that:

0) Sites are not sorted by date of inclusion but by alphabetic order of the title. This way it is easy to find a site of which you only know the title.

1) We do not want to rank sites. We just categorize them. We are no judges but collectors. So any idea of ranking is incompatible per se. :)

2) Most external users don't use dmoz.org but one of the many mirrors - most clicks on dmoz.org are in fact by editors, so judging by number of clicks would not be very objective anyway. (Of course we don't have any access to clickrates on external servers)

Anyway: You are free to download the ODP data and publish it on your own server, applying any ranking algorithm you can think of. :)
 
B

Banbin

Many thanks for your reply. Now I know DMOZ is an encyclopaedia from A TO Z in a sense :p .
 
totalxsive

totalxsive

Member
Joined
Mar 25, 2002
Messages
2,348
Location
Yorkshire, UK
Sites that stand out in a category can be marked as 'Cool' - they appear at the top of the listings in bold with a star next to them. This is reserved for either official sites, or truly outstanding sites with oodles of unique content. But that's as far as ranking goes.

More information about cool sites is in our guidelines.
 
X

xixtas01

Member
Joined
Jun 16, 2003
Messages
624
The Google directory (which is based on ODP data) ranks pages by pagerank. I am not aware of a data user who ranks pages by click-through (although it wouldn't surprise me terribly to find one.)

<added>
Alexa provides a "Top 5" for each category in their directory (also uses ODP data) based on click-through.
</added>
 
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