DMOZ (Open Directory Project) Turns 11 Years Old Today

Jun 5, 2009 at 9:02am ET by Barry Schwartz

The DMOZ Blog informed us that the largest human volunteer edited web directory has turned 11 years old today. The Open Directory Project, aka DMOZ.org, launched on June 5, 1998, eleven years ago today.

DMOZ boosts tens of thousands of volunteer editors and millions of websites in more than a half-million categories and content in more than 80 languages. Happy Birthday DMOZ!

Yahoo, a few months ago, celebrated their 14th birthday, with the launch of their directory on March 2, 1995.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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5 COMMENTS ON DMOZ (Open Directory Project) Turns 11 Years Old Today

chiropractic, June 5th, 2009 at 10:25 am ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

Well Happy Birthday DMOZ!

Ed, June 6th, 2009 at 12:48 pm ET:

Barry,

Thanks but no thanks. DMOZ is full of spam and I’ll bet the so called volunteers work for the major SEO companies. It’s such a joke. so hard to get a legitamite site included in DMOZ. Be a man, do some research and write a detailed post on DMOZ listing success stories.

Webnauts, June 7th, 2009 at 4:10 pm ET:
Premium member since 07/2009

I do not see what is great that DMOZ has birthday. That directory became a spam farm. They removed my website webnauts.net (which was included for years) when I asked them for a reason why do they not accept my site seoworkers.com.

I fully agree with Ed above. That is a monopoly of some major SEO companies. I reported during the last few years 3 editors for abuse. They kick them out and what did I get for a thank you?

Why don’t you tell here what is so great about them?

zuko105, June 8th, 2009 at 11:01 am ET:

Yay!

Now maybe they can get some actual employees with dedicated responsive staff or maybe a responsive volunteer base to make them relevant and useful again.

blainevess, June 9th, 2009 at 8:22 pm ET:

Happy birthday, but who even uses DMOZ? Google gave it a boost by placing value on the links in the directory, but I really hope this isn’t the case anymore. Google itself has been successful simply because it doesn’t follow the inefficient, biased, and unreliable directory structure that DMOZ follows.

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