A year not unusual..
I have received an email which discusses *the problem* from another point of view. It is pretty provocative and I'd like to see the arguements dismanteld if possible. Open for discussion:
DMOZ in 2005 or Is DMOZ Dead?
(a.k.a. The Open Directory Project)
By Phil Craven (c) 2005 (
http://www.webworkshop.net)
The original concept of DMOZ was excellent for its time. The
DMOZ site's "About" (
http://dmoz.org/about.html) page makes
these statements about the concept, and about the reasons for
the directory's creation:-
"Automated search engines are increasingly unable to turn up
useful results to search queries. The small paid editorial
staffs at commercial directory sites can't keep up with
submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their
directories has suffered. Link rot is setting in and they can't
keep pace with the growth of the Internet."
"The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most
important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century. Just
as the Oxford English Dictionary became the definitive word on
words through the efforts of volunteers, the Open Directory
follows in its footsteps to become the definitive catalog of the
Web."
But things have changed a lot since DMOZ began in the mid 1990s.
Since then, Google came along with very relevant search results,
and they were kind enough to show the other engines how to
produce such relevant results. That caused dramatic
improvements, to the extent that top search engines have been
able to provide very relevant search results for some time, and
they provide a lot more of them than DMOZ is able to do.
The small paid editorial staffs at commercial directory sites
still can't keep up with submissions, but their backlogs are
small when compared with DMOZ's massive backlog. According to
reports, there are over a million site submissions that are
waiting to be reviewed, and delays of several years between
submitting a site and it being reviewed are not uncommon. The
backlog problem is so huge that many editors have redefined the
problem so that it no longer exists. To them there is no
backlog, because the submitted sites are not there to be
reviewed. They are merely a low priority pool of sites that they
can dip into if they want to, and some of them prefer to find
sites on their own.
Link rot (dead links) has become widespread in DMOZ through the
years, and they certainly can't "keep pace with the growth of
the Web". There isn't a single reason for the creation of DMOZ
that DMOZ itself doesn't now suffer from.
So how come such an excellent original concept ended up with a
directory that has the same problems that it sought to solve,
and on a much larger scale?
One reason is that the Web has grown at a much faster pace than
was perhaps anticipated, and the DMOZ editors simply can't keep
up. Another reason is that there are simply not enough editors
who are adding sites to the directory. At the time of writing,
the DMOZ front page (
http://dmoz.org/) boasts 69,412 editors,
but that is the number of editors that they've had since the
beginning, and most of them are no longer there. A recent report
stated that there are currently about 10,000 editors who are
able to edit, and that only around 3,000 of those are active in
building the directory. The word "active" is used to describe
editors who actually edit quite often, but as little as one
edit every few months is acceptable. The word doesn't mean
"busy", although some of them are.
With so few people doing anything, it isn't even possible for
them to keep up with the link rot in such a huge directory, and
there's the ever increasing problem of listings that link to
topics other than what they were listed for. It simply isn't
possible for them to maintain the directory as they would like.
The idea of becoming "the definitive catalog of the Web" was a
fine one, but it turned out to be an impossible dream. The
purpose of DMOZ is dead. Today's search engines produce
excellent results in large quantities, and much more quickly
than drilling down into a directory to find something.
So is there any value at all in the DMOZ directory? As a useful
catalog of the Web, and when compared with the major search
engines, the answer is no, although a few people do find it to
be a useful research resource. For website owners, the links to
their websites that a listing in DMOZ creates are useful for
search engine ranking purposes, but even those are becoming less
useful as search engines improve, and seek to block out unwanted
duplicate content from their indexes.
It was a fine concept, and it looked promising for a while, but
the idea of DMOZ becoming the definitive catalog of the Web is
gone. Improvements in the search engines eclipsed its value, and
the growth rate of the Web meant that it could never achieve its
goal. It began with an excellent concept, and they gave it a
good shot, but it didn't work. The continuing growth rate of the
Web ensures that it can never work. It continues as a good
directory of a large number of web sites, but that is all. And
not many people use directories when the search engines produce
such good results, and so quickly.
