After the dot com crash? many of the spiders just stopped indexing new content. The altavista index became way out of date. If you weren't already in a yahoo ca

After the dot com crash? many of the spiders just stopped indexing new content. The altavista index became way out of date. If you weren't already in a yahoo category you weren't getting in. Dmoz didn't even have the editors to appoint any new editors... It was less a failure than a mass giving up, as if everyone had gone but forgotten to turn the servers off when they left.