The Other Search Engines

**Xdmoz** · 01:57 PM

An e-mail was sent to me with one comment on it which was:

Is DMOZ Really a Non-Profit Organization?

Dmoz is owned by Netscape and Netscape is owned by AOL, which is a 300 billion dollar company.

It does appear certain companies appear to receive a priority status with the number of pages submitted and where they are placed and in some cases an editor comes with the company.

I have seen editors with no prior editing in ODP receiving EditAll status (gives you the ability to edit any place within the system) or Regional which gave them editing permissions for the entire Regional categories. ie: US, Canada and other country localities.

Dmoz has about 25 paid employees, which is a lot if it is a non-profit company.

If you were paying a few hundred thousand dollars a year for the use of data from other sources for your search engine and you can obtain the same data free through a non-profit business would that be good? Thus, AOL and Netscape have full use of the data. Any thoughts about this?

Personally, I kept looking the other way about the status of non-profit vs. profit until someone, I know, asked AOL the price of a keyword. Since I was about the only editor that maintained the category with the keyword I begin to think more about the non-profit when AOL quoted price of $7,000.00 per year for his site to appear in the top portion of the search results in AOL, for the work I was doing free.

**fonzerelli_79** · 09-03-2002, 02:10 PM

google and other search engines use the results from dmoz and they wont be getting them for free - the money has to go somewhere

**david** · 09-04-2002, 07:03 PM

I think the other search engines do get them for free. I know that anyone can use the data for free, and there are a number of scripts which allow it.

Personally, I think that DMOZ are still non-profit, even though AOL own them. As with any business, there will be some extent of corruption in the sytem, but it can't be massively expensive for AOL to keep it running (if you own as much infrastructure as they do, one more site isn't going to be a huge cost) so I belive they are still running it (mostly) as it started.

**DaveTodd** · 09-05-2002, 06:52 AM

if Dmoz have 25 employees, they are getting paid somehow. the company must be running some legitimate business deals, because otherwise people would have started to investigate the company sooner.

if aol are quoting $7,000 for a keyword, then thats because aol is a big search engine and they want to make a fat profit on the revenue that is going to be generated by the top ranking - makes perfect sense. they want to cash in on the other sites success.

as far as editors and aol getting better rankings, this is purely aol corruption. they want to give themselves a boost in other search engines, not only in Dmoz, and thus they "rig" the Dmoz results to do this for them - its smart marketing

**DaveMo~** · 09-05-2002, 11:26 AM

Quote:

Dmoz has about 25 paid employees, which is a lot if it is a non-profit company.

Not really. There's several non-profit or not-for-profit organizations that have paid employees.

Even non-profit organizations have large price tags on some things.

Like Dave said, if I can read about large price tags and someone paying it, then so can the ones that would investigate their business license and type. I say "I" like, we the little people, not the super investigative reports and the such.

Dave

**DaveTodd** · 09-07-2002, 08:23 AM

lol, which Dave Dave? cause the last 3 (4 now) people to post were all called Dave. Ooh, this could get confusing...

Dmoz, as a non-profit organisation, are still charging heavily for keyword placement, understandably so. They still need to run their business. Even non-profit businesses have expenditures. And with Dmoz, they need their 25 employees, servers, bandwith, and multiple other things I'm sure. Thus they need at least SOME money to keep the company running.

I agree, with charges of $7000 for a keyword, it does seem like they should be making a fat profit, but perhaps this is all passed on to Netscape or AOL, perhaps the money goes to other sources, we don't know is the honest answer. It does seem strange, but if they claim they're non-profit, and no-one can prove otherwise, then I guess we just have to accept it as true