DMOZ

What is DMOZ?

DMOZ stands for "Directory Mozilla" and was formerly known as Open Directory Project. Mozilla was an early name for the Netscape Navigator web browser. The best way to think of it is like Wikipedia only with lists of websites instead of "facts" from the crowd. The information and the database are freely available on the web for companies.

In essence, these are DMOZ is a relic of an old method of cataloging websites. Yahoo! began with a similar system of manually categorizing websites, similar to categorizing books in a library. Each website was categorized by its Content (what librarians call "aboutness") and assigned to the category or categories to which they best corresponded.

How does DMOZ work?

For example, you could use the Homepage from DMOZ click on Business and find 10,000e links. From there you can look at Management, then Supply Chain (90 links) and finally Consultig (13 links). At this point you will see a brief description of what you would find on any website. If it turns out that this is not what you need, you can use the Breadcrumb navigation at the top of the page to trace the path.

You could also just skip all those categories and search for a few keywords, but you'll only find search results for items that are also in the DMOZ-catalog. Since the voluntary process of DMOZ-cataloging takes time, the information is probably not always fresh and certainly not complete.

This shows well why this is an outdated method of finding websites. The existing amount of websites is huge, which is why manual categorization would take a very very long time. The Google, Bing and Yahoo! search engines simply skip cataloging and inventory the web automatically for new websites. The Relevance is determined by a computer algorithm and not manually by humans.

However, this does not mean that the DMOZ-approach is useless. There are a variety of cataloging systems. Since DMOZ-pages are always reviewed by people, they are usually of better quality than a random search on the Internet.