Search Engine Marketing Blog

The DMOZ Challenge

The DMOZ challenge stems from a disbelief that it’s possible to get a web site approved for inclusion in the DMOZ database within a three month period. The challenge was issued on an ad revenue-sharing forum in January of 2007.

DEFINITIONS

DMOZ is also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP. The name DMOZ comes from its original domain name directory.mozilla.org due to its loose affiliation with the Mozilla project. The concept behind the organization of the Open Directory Project it’s a human edited open content directory of web sites. ODP is currently owned by Netscape and is multilingual. It’s maintained by a community of volunteer editors who must be approved by existing editors. Web sites are categorized using a hierarchical ontology scheme in which sites are grouped by individuals, classes or sets of objects, attributes, relations or events. Ontology is a representation of how the field of knowledge is categorized. In practice, major categories are broken down into smaller and smaller units, each a part of the one above it.

HISTORY

The Open Directory Project was begun as the Gnuhoo in 1998. The Free Software Project objected to the use of “Gnu” in the name, because FSP believed it to be against the spirit of free software. Gnuhoo became NewHoo, whereupon Yahoo objected. Before the name could be changed to the new choice of ZURL, Netscape acquired the project and it became ODP. Netscape was obtained by AOL that later merged with Time-Warner. The number of indexed URL’s has grown from 100,000 shortly after acquisition by Netscape to over 4 million in December 2003. On line reports have been available and updated monthly since January 2006.

By May of 2005 75 world languages are included with almost 7500 active editors at that time.

CONTENT

Editors specializing in adding new listings, editing existing listing for spelling and grammatical errors, or removing spam and duplicates from submissions, maintain the directory. Content users include Yahoo, Netscape, Google, AOL and Alexa. Over 300 websites are licensed to use ODP data in the English language with an additional 238 in other languages.

Because ODP has maintained its stance of no cost for admissions, there has been a gradual divergence of content of the directory between ODP and other directories which use paid submissions. The free directory tends to attract more informational articles and websites, while the commercial directories are increasingly showing heavier concentration of merchandise and commercial products.

EDITORS

The structure of editors is hierarchical in the same way as the categories. New editors not picked lightly and some sections or categories go for long period with not editing, as a result.

COMPLAINTS

Although there are written procedures in place for dealing with complaints, critics state that there is bias amongst editors for their own web sites. There may be conflict of interest issues at work since statistics about the number of web sites owned by editors show a high percentage of editor websites are approved for admission to the directory.

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