Dmoz General History and Information

Motivation and founders

ODP was founded as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998. At the time, Skrenta and Truel were working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta was already well known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. Coincidentally, the original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

Gnuhoo to Newhoo to the Open Directory Project

The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998, and was renamed Newhoo after a Slashdot article was posted in which posters claimed that Gnuhoo had nothing in common with the spirit of free software for which the GNU project was known and was simply a commercial enterprise seeking to construct an alternative to Yahoo! using volunteer labor.[1] Newhoo became ODP after it was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October 1998 and the content was released under an open content license. Netscape was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter, and ODP was one of the assets included in the acquisition. AOL later merged with Time-Warner.

Directory growth and maturation

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the number of URLs in the Open Directory surpassed the number of URLs in the Yahoo! directory in April 2000 with about 1.6 million URLs. ODP achieved the milestone of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, and the milestone of three million listings was reached on November 18, 2001. As of November 2005, ODP had about 5.2 million listings organized into over 590,000 categories derived from the contributions of some 70,000 editors. The number of active editor accounts (that is, those editor logins which had not been removed, voluntarily resigned, or timed out due to inactivity of four months) hovers between roughly 9,000 and 10,000.

Competing and spinoff projects

ODP has inspired the formation of two other major web directories edited by volunteers and sponsored by public companies: the now defunct Go directory (formerly owned by The Walt Disney Company), and Zeal (acquired by LookSmart). However, neither of these web directories has licensed their content for open content distribution, a strategy which ensured ODP's success in a highly competitive market. The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile online content has been successfully applied to other types of projects such as Wikipedia.

Three open content volunteer projects have been inspired by ODP's editing model: an open content restaurant directory known as ChefMoz (launched by ODP management), an open content music directory known as MusicMoz, and an encyclopedia known as Open Site . However, none of the three have yet achieved success at the level of ODP.