March 15, 2000

3:08 PM

What do you get when you crossGoogle with DMOZ? I don't exactly know, but it's been done by some mad scientists at AOL/Netscape/Time/Warner/Turner/Nullsoft/HBO/EMI/DC/etcetra........
And you thought it was safe to go back on the web when Yahoo and eBay cut off their merger talks.
posted by wendell (6 comments total)

D'moozle?
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 3:15 PM on March 15, 2000

It sounds good in theory, but I worry about useful pages like Google! being turned into commercial sellout suckage (never found dmoz to be that useful to begin with).
posted by spacecoyote at 3:31 PM on March 15, 2000

GooDmoz.
Or, using its alias as "Open Directory", GooPen.
posted by wendell at 5:02 PM on March 15, 2000

Maybe we could think about substance for a moment. Google remains impressively able to hand me just the document I'm looking for nine times out of ten, and in my experience dmoz.org's category listings are updated much more frequently than Yahoo's (of course!). So I see this as a marriage made in heaven. I am not entirely sold on the interface Google is using to show that a search result came from the Open Directory, though. There seems to be a turf issue here: Google has always given you a simple mass listing of hits, while Dmoz and Yahoo give you categories first, then mass listings. Google seems to be going out of its way to avoid a separate listing of categories-- to avoid looking like Yahoo or its new partner, Dmoz? I dunno.

Surely a company that managed to produce relatively inobtrusive textual banner ads can come up with a way to clearly separate categories from mass matches.

(www.massmatches.com?)
posted by joeclark at 9:41 AM on March 16, 2000

Yes, joeclark, I completely agree. I worry though how long it will take before Google! becomes yet another ad banner clogged piece of crap. We all know that corporate interests are only interested in the bottom line (read $$$). I hope that Google! proves me wrong.
posted by spacecoyote at 11:17 AM on March 16, 2000

Well, that wasn't what I was saying. Google seems so intent-- rather in the style of diehard Unix command-line types-- to avoid anything but a strict, almost brainless linear exposition of one search hit after another that they are ignoring the desirable goal of somehow making Open Directory categories more visible and manipulable.

Is what I'm saying.
posted by joeclark at 9:27 AM on March 17, 2000