The Internet's Hidden Treasure (dmoz.org)

Member Name: darrenloud

Product:	dmoz.org
Date:	03/08/01 (69 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Human-edited, Excelent for webmaster listings

Disadvantages: Not such a great design

Dmoz.org is the home of the Open Directory Project, ODP for short.

Very few people seem to be aware of this site, even though almost everyone has indirectly used it.

The ODP is the largest human-edited directory, their motto being 'Human's do it better'. It contains more than 2million recommended, hand-picked links.

The ODP's main function is supporting many of the largest search engines in the world, such as lycos, netscape and AOLsearch to name just a few. You'll notice that often a link appears in a catagory style when you search for generic things like places for instance. These are often provided by the ODP.

Because of this, it is important that webmasters get listed on here. It's a very efficient way of getting your URL submitted to search engines and certainly helps getting higher up the lists.

I should let you know that I am the editorr for the town of Lowestoft's catagory (that's why I know about it). You should be aware that not every one gets listed, far from it in fact. If you consider that google.com has a database of more than 1.6billion URL's and the ODP has only 2million, there's a big difference.

Relevance, factual and interesting content and submitting to the right catagories are all essential things if you want to get listed.

For those of you that don't dabble in web design, you should check it out. It's a well structured web site, simple in design and you can be sure that every indexed link is a good one, as it has been reviewed by human, possibly even me!

Have fun and happy searching!

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