I 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.
I 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.
Years 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.
There 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, ...)
For 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
Before 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
Sort of an open-sourced alternative to the original Yahoo concept -- back when that was Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, essentially a set of nested links directing you through the Internet, circa 1995 - 1997.
After Yahoo (mostly) retired that in exchange for Search, Netscape created a crowdsourced version. AOL acquired that when they bought out Netscape.
No, 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.
It used to be significant enough that it was always on the list of things to do when you wanted to get traffic or reputation for your website. I rarely if ever actually used it to find anything, but I definitely listed my companies and services on it.
Does any know if the sources for Dmoz are available? I found 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.
What'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.
Without having influence on search and no consumers ever using it, it stopped serving any function.