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1998 - 2017
DMOZ
“Volunteers tried to put the web in order.”
- Birth year
- 1998
- Shutdown year
- 2017
- Lifespan
- 19 years
- Peak era
- 1998–2017
- Company
- Open Directory Project / AOL
- Category
- Websites
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What Was It?
DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project, was a volunteer-edited directory of websites. Its subject tree offered a human-made map of the internet that could be reused by other services.
Browsing a subject tree made the web look organized by people. Each category reflected decisions about where a site belonged and which resources deserved inclusion. That offered a different kind of discovery from typing a query and receiving an automatically ranked results page.
The directory's reusable material also gave its work a life beyond its own homepage. Its history highlights the effort involved in maintaining a map of a changing web: links disappear, subjects grow, and editorial judgments must be revisited over time.
Things You Probably Forgot
- DMOZ was also called the Open Directory Project.
- Volunteer editors maintained topical sections of the directory.
The Story
- 1998 DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project, was a volunteer-edited directory of websites.
- 1998 The project launches with an approach based on distributed human editors rather than only automated crawling.
- 2017 AOL ended support for DMOZ and the directory closed in March 2017. Community efforts continued separately afterward.
How It Died
AOL ended support for DMOZ and the directory closed in March 2017. Community efforts continued separately afterward.
What Replaced It?
Memories
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