Dmoz closed as of Mar 14, 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Dmoz closed as of Mar 14, 2017

dmoz.org

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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 actually edited one of the SEO sections. THAT gave me sudden status in the SEO world ...

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.

Aol has a bunch of services that have just been hanging around for years that they're finally getting around to shutting down.

A shame they can't just leave it up as static files. It might already be static files, it's a perfect structure for it.

we're giving the DB dumps to archive.org after we shut it down, I believe.

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.

We used the site to seed our crawlers. It's been great.

It was good as a list of domains to initialize a web crawler.

Good riddance. Dmoz had a toxic wikipedia-like community of editors without having any real value for the end user.

There's a page for them on the Archive Team but it's not populated yet: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Dmoz

That's sad. Directories are super useful, especially to help with serendipity... you can't know what you don't now.

Are there any other active directories? Seems Yahoo Directory is also gone for good.

As far I know, there are no other active directories.

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

What was it? (Completely serious, not trolling)

Imagine 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?)

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.

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

Yep 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.

Yeah, it used to live at http://directory.mozilla.org/ (actually that URL still redirects to dmoz).

Website Yellow Pages. Take a look at the categories list for an idea of how sites were cataloged: http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf/categories.txt

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.

Kind of ironic that both AOL and Yahoo have been or are being eaten by Verizon.

There is that.

Turns out content isn't king after all, channel is.

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.

The 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-f...

I 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!

Wow, 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.

If you want to grab a dump while it's still available...

http://rdf.dmoz.org/

I must not be the only one downloading, it's going pretty slowly.

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.

I feel like this is another sign the Internet of the 90s is dying.

It's a series of tubes. They can't stay filled up with nostalgia forever.

I'm working on putting up a mirror of dmoz at www.zedurl.com.

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