InformationWeek

Netscape acquired a number of editors in November 1998 when it bought NewHoo, a group of 4,500 volunteers who bring a human touch to search engines. With its subsequent purchase of Netscape, America Online now owns the renamed Open Directory Project, which has more than 25,000 volunteer editors and lists nearly 1.8 million Web sites. Its motto is: "Humans do it better."

Anyone can volunteer, as long as he or she can claim expertise in a specific area or category. "The goal of editors should be to produce useful resources for the Web public," states the Open Directory Project at its Web site, www.dmoz.org. "We don't bar editors with business affiliations, since those editors with their own sites usually know their competition and related sites better than anyone. This knowledge can be ideal for helping build an authoritative directory. However, we will not tolerate editors who only add their own sites, or maliciously interfere with others' listings in the directory."

The project supplies tools for editing, deleting, and updating links. And every major search engine uses some of Open Directory Project's information on its own search engine. The directory is freely licensed to anyone or any search engine that wants it.

Bob Massa, president of Magic-city.net, an Oklahoma City company that helps Web sites achieve high search-engine rankings, is a fan of human editors, even though they make his job harder. "Human-review directories are doing a better job than spiders," he says.

Based on what clients tell him, he builds and tweaks Web sites by focusing on keywords and content that are designed to appeal to human editors instead of spiders. He reiterates his own Web site's advice: "Content is king, and fresh content is even kinger."