What is the open directory project?
The
Open Directory project is basically a categorized website list. All sites on the list were previously approved by editors who ensure that they are properly categorized and meet certain instructions. Editors are volunteers and anyone can become an editor, although some categories are limited. The directory has existed since the late 90's years and has been used as the basis of many main search engines.
before the open directory project was created, there was already a yahoo !, which served a similar purpose. Many people were dissatisfied with the overall quality of Yahoo! The creators hoped that the voluntary forces of online editors could do better jobs to maintain current links and sort through all different websites on the web.
And the open directory project was particularly important in the first days of the Internet. At that time, search engines were often less efficient in the website evaluation. People would often have to wade through pages with most spam to find usefulSites for many search expressions. The site with human editors has made it possible to filter out unnecessary websites, and so these services were very beneficial.
Over time, search engines have finally developed better algorithms for web ranking, but many of these search engines actually rely on the open directory project as the basic building block of their databases. In the first days of the Internet, most search engines rely very much on the process of constant "spider" through links on the web and created a database of random sites. Over time, search engines began to use websites, such as the Open Directory project to help bring the website in a more useful order. Spidering is still part of the process, but other processes help keep things organized better.
Many people still present sites to the Open Directory project, partly because of its importance for manyMain search engines. Sometimes the approval of the site may be a lengthy process because the editor's workforce is somewhat limited. It is also very common that websites owners slow down this process by their pages in the wrong category. The categories themselves are generally quite extensive and it is relatively easy to select the wrong category randomly. When this happens, the editor usually puts the back in the back of the queue for another category, which means that it can be potentially more than twice as long as it is approved.