DMOZ the open Directory project is closing. Yes you have read it right. This marks the end of the era when the humans instead of the machines used to organise the web. This was an announcement that was made on the 28th February 2017, via a notice which was then displayed on their home page saying that it would close as of March 14 2017.
DMOZ was generally believed to be a multilingual open content directory of the World Wide Web. This was a site that was generally maintained by a community known as the open Directory project, which was again owned by AOL but was then constructed and maintained by community of volunteer editors.
DMOZ was born in the month of June 1988 as Gnuhoo, and then soon changed into Newhoo, which was believed to be a rival to the yahoo directory during those times. Yahoo to this had turned out to face huge criticism as being a powerful tool it was still the most difficult site to be listed in. It was soon then acquired by Netscape in the month of November 1998, and was renamed ad the Netscape open directory. A month later the AOL went ahead and acquired Netscape giving them the entire control of the open directory.
This was also the year when Google was born, which then started the end of human curation of websites. Google bought in the power of being able to search every page of a specific website followed by relevancy which was believed to be a hallmark of the human powered directories.
DMOZ continued on although for most of the marketers and the researchers it still had a long and mostly forgotten resource. And actually it has taken too long.
