The original concept of DMOZ was excellent for its time.

The DMOZ site’s About page makes these statements about the concept, and 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 staff at commercial directory sites can’t keep up with submissions, and the quality and comprehensiveness of their directories have 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.”

However, things have changed significantly since DMOZ began in the mid-1990s.

Since then, Google has provided very relevant search results, and they were kind enough to show other engines how to produce similar results. That caused dramatic improvements, to the extent that top search engines have been able to provide very relevant search results for some time. They also offer a lot more of them than DMOZ can.

The small paid editorial staff at commercial directory sites still can’t keep up with submissions, but their backlogs are smaller compared to DMOZ’s massive backlog.

According to reports, over a million site submissions are waiting to be reviewed, and delays of several years between submitting a site and its review 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 draw from if needed, and some prefer to find their sites.

Link rot (dead links) has become widespread in DMOZ over 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 nöw suffer from. So, how did such an excellent original concept end up with a directory that has the same problems it sought to solve, but 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 can’t keep up. Another reason is that there aren’t enough editors adding sites to the directory. At the time of writing, the DMOZ front page boasts 69,412 editors, but that is the number of editors they have had since the beginning, and most of them are no longer there.

A recent report stated that there are currently around 10,000 editors who can edit, and that only about 3,000 of them are active in building the directory.

The word “active” is used to describe editors who frequently edit, but even making 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’s even impossible 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 intended 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 valuable catalog of the Web, and when compared with significant 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 listed in DMOZ are helpful for search engine ranking purposes. Still, even these are becoming less useful as search engines improve and seek to block 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 nevër 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 nevër work. It remains a good directory of many websites, but that’s all. And not many people use directories when the search engines produce such good results, and so quickly.

About The Author
Article by Phil Craven of WebWorkShop. Phil is well-known in the world of web admins and search engine optimization, and his views have been sought and published by various online and offline publications.