DMOZ — the Open Directory Project — officially closed today. The move comes three days later than originally planned. It marks the end of an era of humans trying to catalog the entire web.
DMOZ was a project designed to organize the web using volunteer human editors and born during a time when a rival to the dominant Yahoo Directory was seen as needed. Nearly 19 years later, neither directory lives, with machine-powered search engines having made them archaic.
For more background, see our articles below:
- The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close
- RIP DMOZ: The Open Directory Project is closing
Unlike with the Yahoo Directory, the DMOZ site continues to operate, at least with a home page that says it is closed. It also links to a mirror copy of the last version of DMOZ before it closed.
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