The Open Directory Project, the open directory, was the largest directory project ever built by human effort. ODP closed on 17 March 2017; the account below belongs to the period when the directory was live, and to our editing work in those years. Looking at ODP in numbers, there were 4,056,658 sites, 90,355 editors and 1,024,707 categories. While the directory was live those figures rose seriously every day. According to Netcraft figures there were 166 billion web pages at the time. Working out a small ratio, 0.0024% of them had been listed inside ODP. As one of the ODP editors I can say we still had a long way to go back then: there were a great many site records waiting to be reviewed.
0.0024% of websites had been listed in ODP.
What DMOZ Was, in Short
DMOZ.Org came out of the philosophy that people can judge a quality site better than a machine can. It was founded under the name GnuHoo/NewHoo, bought by Netscape in 1998, and passed after that into AOL. The sites listed inside the categories were reviewed by editors, on content and on design, within the guidelines. If the editor decided at the end of the review that the site had quality, they listed it inside ODP. That process carried serious weight for the future of a web page.
Thinking about it in terms of our own web development process, we can say that back then half of SEO was getting into DMOZ. If you had produced a project with quality all the way through, and your content was original and brought a new approach to the sector, there was no more natural outcome than being listed in DMOZ. If you have no knowledge of SEO, you may want to look through our what SEO is article.
A site listed inside DMOZ;
AOL – Ask – Bing – Blekko – DuckDuckGo – Gigablast – Google – ixquick – Yahoo – Yandex – Yippy
It helped a site win a position in search engines like those, world famous and the most used. At the time 99.9% of the world's search engines drew on ODP data and used the directory as a starting point for their reviews; their approach to the sites listed in ODP was different from their approach to the ones that were not.
Being listed on DMOZ.Org was a considerable privilege. ODP was held in the highest regard across every developed internet platform in the world, the search engines first among them. Because nothing more useful came along to replace it until it closed, DMOZ.Org set the direction of the world's internet for many years.
Why It Mattered That Your Company Was There
If your company's web page carried original content and a pleasant, functional design, you could put in a “site suggestion” to ODP; those with trained knowledge in their own field could also make an “editor application”. ODP, which I have been a part of since 2005, was of the highest use in my own development. And being on the same platform as the people running the Turkish internet was a pleasure of its own.
The flow for suggesting a site went like this: you started from the Dmoz Türkçe category, found the category related to your site, and used the “Suggest Site” link at the top right. Because the directory closed, those addresses no longer work today.
