The People vs. Yahoo (dmoz.org)

Member Name: TheKnight

Product:	dmoz.org
Date:	01/08/00 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Listings for users, by users.

Disadvantages: Editors do not get paid.

Dmoz, short for Directory Mozilla, but better known as the Open Directory Project, is a web directory that rivals Yahoo, and yet is built by volunteers.

ODP began as GnuHoo, a name that clearly identified both its rivalry with Yahoo, and its allegiance to the Open Source movement. Rich Skrenta was the man with the plan (and the know-how) to turn general disatisfaction with the Yahoo Directory into something truly momentous.

Yahoo reject 95% of all submissions (or such was their proud claim at the time) and often takes months before deigning to even look at a submitted site. Results are often out of date too.

Rather than simply moan, Skrenta and friends created their own directory that anyone could voluntarily become an editor for to improve the listings of their own specialist subjects. Eventually, the directory was taken under the wing of Netscape in connection with the Mozilla project. (Mozilla is the codename of the Open Source project Netscape bravely began).

The Open Directory has since grown and grown. Well over 25,000 editors have contributed to the directory, creating hundreds of thousands of categories and literally millions of listings. Its database is roughly on par with Yahoo already, but it has a far higher growth rate.

The ODP remains free and non-profit. There are free scripts that allow you to use the ODP data as the basis for your very own search engine. Additionally a very prestigious array of portals and search engines have added the dmoz data to their own, so they may add the quality of human indexed listings to their robotically generated indexes.

Main clients include the Netscape directory, AOL, Google, Lycos, etc. The Looksmart directory was Yahoo's only rival before the ODP, and when AltaVista dropped the Looksmart data in favour of the ODP data, Looksmart knew they were in trouble. In fact, Looksmart are now paying other search engines to use their data at all, and are charging webmas
ters $199 just to be considered for listing, in order to raise the money to 'buy back' their position in the larger search engines.

The search features of Dmoz have never been the primary concern. Like all web directories, sites are categorized by topic, and the directory can be 'browsed' quickly and easily. With web directories, you do not get multiple listings of the same site in your results, and because the sites are organized by topic, its a great way to do some comparison shopping.

However, the very best thing about dmoz is that anytime you find a fault with it you are free to sign up as a volunteer and help make it even better. Not much chance of you having a similar effect on the Yahoo or Looksmart directories.

If you love the web, and get on well in the 'virtual' communities that spring up, you will probably enjoy being an ODP editor. When applying, you have to start out small and work up, so its best to apply for a category that (1) has no editor at the time, and (2) hasn't any sub-categories under it yet.

There are tons of vacancies for UK editors in the dmoz Regional categories right now, so if you like the idea, can spell and have good grammar, and most importantly, can categorize and describe websites as part of a huge team of fellows then go to http://dmoz.org and become a part of the world's most amazing web directory.

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