From the Dewey Decimal System to Mahalo

I've been thinking about an odd comment in John Battelle's The Search [p. 33] regarding the Dewey Decimal System:
The Dewey decimal system has been updated numerous times over the years and is still widely used, but its subject-based focus would be unable to scale to the enormousness of the World Wide Web.

It's a passing comment from Battelle so I'm not using it to criticize his work but I think it's fairly obvious that the Dewey Decimal System wasn't designed to address search within resources so how could it be scalable in relationship to search?  It's simply not relevant once you get past the problem of a classification system designed to deal with individual objects and move on to the actual contents.

But subject-based classification systems are eminently scalable to the "enormousness" of the Web when categorizing individual resources and allowing for multiple subject categories per resource as shown by the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory.

On a related note, one has to wonder if the seemingly universal shift to search replacing portals was spurred in some small part by the devolution of the Yahoo! Directory to an overpriced SEO catalog and of the Open Directory to a poorly maintained collection of inconsistent quality.

Obviously even a well-maintained directory of websites is not a search engine.  So if you've got a web directory but a search engine's what you need, just fire up a Google Custom Search Engine, have it automatically add all the links from your directory and then let them provide the search of all the sites listed via one engine that can monetize the service via Google text ads.

Though you'll have to acknowledge Google's obvious involvement, you can then flip from directory mode, make your landing page the Google search box and call your site a search engine.

Similar to the Jason Calacanis/Mahalo model.

[Disclaimer: I'm a former Open Directory editor.]

Comments

[Marc]

I was under the impression that the Open Directory project was widely only accepting of quality cites. Then again, I've never actually USED it, but that was always the impression I was left with. I won't argue with a previous editor of it, though; you certainly know better than I do of its quality, I'm sure.

[Clyde Smith]

That comes down to issues such as "who defines quality?" and "what happens when a site goes unedited for an extended period."

I was editing around 2002 to 2005 and took on quite a few sections that had been unattended for a long time. In editing a section that might have ten entries, I would often find one to two hundred submissions waiting to be considered that had been made over a period of multiple years.

Entries that were already entered had often gone dead or were now hosting ads or worse.

But what I'm also referring to in the post is the willingness of editors to assume they could evalute resources that were outside realms of knowledge with which they were familiar.

So I would see sites rejected by other editors for categories with which I was familiar in which the rejected site was better than anything actually listed.

The intentions were good. The execution was spotty and inconsistent.

Combine spotty quality controls with widely neglected categories and add a dash of editorial arrogance and you get a directory that's of questionable use.

I used to go to the Open Directory on a regular basis but stopped, not because of my editorial experiences, but because of disappointing results.