If I were to restructure the Open Directory I would almost start from scratch. I love the idea behind the Open Directory, yes I truly believe that human could do it better than computers, but then things would have to change.
The largest problem with the ODP is the many editors and the editor community itself. The original idea was that the editors should be persons with a long experience in a field or otherwise be better to manage a part of the directory than the public. With that idea a lot of power got collected on few hands, most categories has only one editor and that editor is responsible for developing that part of the directory. This is an idea that looks good on the drawing board, but the reality is different.
The largest problem is editor corruption is wide spread; it is both possible to pay to keep a site out of the index and have a site included. I first became aware of the problem after submitting a client’s site back in 2003, after a few days the editor called the client asking for a “kick back”, back then the directory was even more important than it is today so the decision was easy. Most editors are more passive and wait until they are hired to do “link building” or gets $400 via Pay Pal. After all DMOZ is one of the two link sources
recommended by Google, so it is worth paying for. The Yahoo directory is $299/year.
The second problem is editors that are only there to protect their own interests. They add sites they have a personal interest in and keep competitors out of the directory, or edit their title and description in such a way that they would get less traffic.
The third problem is editors that don’t follow the guidelines. I have meet and talked to an editor that said that she was reluctant to add sites with non valid HTML, bad design or advertising. I got the feeling that there are many editors that set the inclusion criteria to high. And there are editors on the other side of the scale that includes almost anything in the directory.
The forth problems is that there are not enough editors is certain parts of the directory. Until the recent server crash which deleted all sites waiting to be reviewed, the queue of unreviewed sites was long and growing. Many webmasters had been waiting for years to be included in the directory.
The fifth problem is the lack of transparency, it is no way for the public to check the status of a submitted site, there are no way to check the edit history of sites included, and there are no way for the public to check the edit history of the editors themselves.
This blog post will continue tomorrow.

[tags]DMOZ, ODP[/tags]