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Dmoz closed as of Mar 14, 2017
- marsrover 10y agoI never found Dmoz particularly helpful. The only thing I ever used it for was submitting my own websites many years ago. That being said, I'm surprised it is still around and I'm surprised that it's shutting down. I wonder why they're shutting down. It would've been nice to hear the reason.
- empath75 10y agoAol has a bunch of services that have just been hanging around for years that they're finally getting around to shutting down.
- jroseattle 10y agoYears ago, I used to manage the team that had ownership of Dmoz within AOL. It was a stepford project within our group that had little/no executive support. Some viewed it as kind of a side or passion project, but there simply was insufficient interest. If I had to venture a guess, it's simply being taken offline due to lack of interest internally at AOL.
- r080 10y agoWe used the site to seed our crawlers. It's been great.
- visarga 10y agoIt was good as a list of domains to initialize a web crawler.
- reiichiroh 10y agoWhat was it? (Completely serious, not trolling)
- oliyoung 10y agoImagine somewhere between Wikipedia, a shared bookmarks.htm file, and Yahoo's directory (from back when Yahoo was relevant) (how much does this comment show my age?)
- torgoguys 10y agoNo, it was pretty much exactly the Yahoo directory, only they allowed the public to add sites...sort of. Someone would claim the editorship of some area and it was up to that person to decide what was allowed. There was no clear process, last I knew, to kick an editor out if he/she weren't doing their job and some editors seemed to have a very particular slant in certain categories, sometimes commercially or otherwise competitively motivated. (I don't want competitor websites added to this category I control). It stagnated.
- timClicks 10y agoBefore decent search engines, Yahoo and others such as Netscape built large directories of sites. Netscape's was called DMOZ (Directory from Mozilla?) and was probably part of AOL's acquisition of Netscape during its demise
- digitalzombie 10y agoYep there was anipike, the anime directory for anything anime related. Relic of the past before search engines. I saw this and went over to check if anipike still alive. It's... a shell.
- currysausage 10y agoYeah, it used to live at http://directory.mozilla.org/ http://directory.mozilla.org/ (actually that URL still redirects to dmoz).
- 10y ago
- exclusiv 10y agoI remember when it was a big deal to get on DMOZ because it seemed to have a lot of SEO clout. It took me awhile to become an editor and then there were a lot of politics in making edits. Without having influence on search and no consumers ever using it, it stopped serving any function.
- CurtMonash 10y agoI actually edited one of the SEO sections. THAT gave me sudden status in the SEO world ...
- kome 10y agoThat's sad. Directories are super useful, especially to help with serendipity... you can't know what you don't now.
- rwbt 10y agoAre there any other active directories? Seems Yahoo Directory is also gone for good.
- kome 10y agoAs far I know, there are no other active directories.
- sebst 10y agoThere are plenty, but all of them are insignificant. What was special about DMOZ is that Google used their data for directory.google.com and used their description texts in some SERPs. That drove interest from SEOs to DMOZ, but imho DMOZ failed to deliver a decent user experience and to find answers to today's web (social media, real time, ...)
- fuck_google 10y agoIt is also sad that search hasn't evolved into something that would support unexpected discovery. Google et al. haven't really been able to provide solutions that would help in getting the big picture and guide you to find something interesting.
- sebst 10y agoFor those who still see value in a curated directory, please help me combine efforts of people willing to contribute to a DMOZ revival by filling out this form: http://goo.gl/tktG9c http://goo.gl/tktG9c
- jonknee 10y agoIf you want to grab a dump while it's still available... http://rdf.dmoz.org/ http://rdf.dmoz.org/ I must not be the only one downloading, it's going pretty slowly.
- sebst 10y agoWhat's missing there are the unreviewed (unedited) sites and submissions. It's planned to get a backup of those from Aol, but I am not aware of the details.
- endgame 10y agoThere's a page for them on the Archive Team but it's not populated yet: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Dmoz http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Dmoz
- tangue 10y agoGood riddance. Dmoz had a toxic wikipedia-like community of editors without having any real value for the end user.
- powera 10y agoI feel like this is another sign the Internet of the 90s is dying.
- Walf 10y agoIt's a series of tubes. They can't stay filled up with nostalgia forever.
- irl_ 10y agoDoes any know if the sources for Dmoz are available? I found http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/cmbuild.html http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/cmbuild.html but couldn't find anything beyond that. While a global directory of the Internet may not be too useful and have largely been replaced by spidering and search, I think specialised directories still have a place and it would be cool if communities could reuse the existing code for that.
- CurtMonash 10y agoThe project was on the old side when I joined and wrote about it 10 years ago. http://www.texttechnologies.com/2007/02/06/a-hobbit-writes-from-the-odp-entmoot/ http://www.texttechnologies.com/2007/02/06/a-hobbit-writes-f...
- frik 10y agoWow, pretty sad. Yahoo, Google and now Dmoz killed their "directory". I though that Dmoz was a community project, very sad that it's getting killed. It's still a very valuable source for web crawlers, as starting point.
- nkkollaw 10y agoI remember submitting all my websites to DMOZ. I got one on there, and I did notice a spike in traffic, mostly from third-party directories that used DMOZ's data. I hadn't visited in probably 10 years. I noticed they redesigned it, it looks good!
- captainbenises 10y agoI'm working on putting up a mirror of dmoz at www.zedurl.com.