
Dmoz closed as of Mar 14, 2017 - scriptproof
http://www.dmoz.org/
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exclusiv
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.

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

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marsrover
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.

~~~
empath75
Aol has a bunch of services that have just been hanging around for years that
they're finally getting around to shutting down.

~~~
jonknee
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.

~~~
empath75
we're giving the DB dumps to archive.org after we shut it down, I believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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sebst
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, ...)

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sebst
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](http://goo.gl/tktG9c)

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reiichiroh
What was it? (Completely serious, not trolling)

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timClicks
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

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

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irl_
Does any know if the sources for Dmoz are available? I found
[http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/cmbuild.html](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.

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CurtMonash
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...](http://www.texttechnologies.com/2007/02/06/a-hobbit-writes-from-
the-odp-entmoot/)

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nkkollaw
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!

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frik
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.

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

[http://rdf.dmoz.org/](http://rdf.dmoz.org/)

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

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sebst
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.

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

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

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

