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91-542: DMOZ (stylized dmoz in its logo; from directory.mozilla.org , an earlier domain name ) was a multilingual open-content directory of World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintained it were also known as the Open Directory Project ( ODP ). It was owned by AOL (now a part of Yahoo! Inc ) but constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. DMOZ used a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on

182-508: A World Wide Web server, and mail.example.com could be an email server, each intended to perform only the implied function. Modern technology allows multiple physical servers with either different (cf. load balancing ) or even identical addresses (cf. anycast ) to serve a single hostname or domain name, or multiple domain names to be served by a single computer. The latter is very popular in Web hosting service centers, where service providers host

273-523: A tree of domain names. Each node in the tree holds information associated with the domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones beginning at the DNS root zone . A domain name consists of one or more parts, technically called labels , that are conventionally concatenated, and delimited by dots, such as example.com . When the Domain Name System was devised in the 1980s, the domain name space

364-495: A FQDN ends in a dot ( . ) to denote the top of the DNS tree. Labels in the Domain Name System are case-insensitive , and may therefore be written in any desired capitalization method, but most commonly domain names are written in lowercase in technical contexts. A hostname is a domain name that has at least one associated IP address . Domain names serve to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services, with

455-695: A component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as websites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org). Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of a resource. Such examples are the realm identifiers used in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the Domain Keys used to verify DNS domains in e-mail systems, and in many other Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). An important function of domain names

546-542: A database of artists and agents, chose whorepresents.com , which can be misread. In such situations, the proper meaning may be clarified by placement of hyphens when registering a domain name. For instance, Experts Exchange , a programmers' discussion site, used expertsexchange.com , but changed its domain name to experts-exchange.com . The domain name is a component of a uniform resource locator (URL) used to access websites , for example: A domain name may point to multiple IP addresses to provide server redundancy for

637-523: A domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS). Any name registered in the DNS is a domain name. Domain names are organized in subordinate levels ( subdomains ) of the DNS root domain, which

728-517: A domain name, the labels are separated by a full stop (period). Domain names are often seen in analogy to real estate in that domain names are foundations on which a website can be built, and the highest quality domain names, like sought-after real estate, tend to carry significant value, usually due to their online brand-building potential, use in advertising, search engine optimization , and many other criteria. A few companies have offered low-cost, below-cost or even free domain registration with

819-429: A few other alternative DNS root providers that try to compete or complement ICANN's role of domain name administration, however, most of them failed to receive wide recognition, and thus domain names offered by those alternative roots cannot be used universally on most other internet-connecting machines without additional dedicated configurations. In the process of registering a domain name and maintaining authority over

910-473: A lack of response to a domain name query as an indication that the domain does not exist, and that the message can be treated as undeliverable. The original VeriSign implementation broke this assumption for mail, because it would always resolve an erroneous domain name to that of Site Finder. While VeriSign later changed Site Finder's behaviour with regard to email, there was still widespread protest about VeriSign's action being more in its financial interest than in

1001-643: A loosely consistent manner; conventions for the naming and building of categories; conflict of interest limitations on the editing of sites which the editor may own or otherwise be affiliated with; and a code of conduct within the community. Editors who are found to have violated these guidelines may be contacted by staff or senior editors, have their editing permissions cut back, or lose their editing privileges entirely. DMOZ Guidelines are periodically revised after discussion in editor forums. There have long been allegations that volunteer DMOZ editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting

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1092-464: A news aggregation site operated by DMOZ founder Rich Skrenta, had more than 17,000 listings. Early in the history of DMOZ, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone or CNN , editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites. Links to individual CNN articles were added until 2004, but were entirely removed from the directory in January 2008 due to

1183-644: A non-editable mirror remained available at dmoztools.net, and it was announced that while the DMOZ URL would not return, a successor version of the directory named Curlie would be provided. By 2018 ODP, DMoz and Curlie were considered synonyms. Curlie was well established by 2022, using the hierarchy from Dmoz. DMOZ was founded in the United States as GnuHoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for Sun Microsystems . Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as

1274-431: A private forum which can only be accessed by DMOZ's staff and meta editors. Volunteer editors who are being discussed are not given notice that such proceedings are taking place. Some people find this arrangement distasteful, wanting instead a discussion modeled more like a trial held in the U.S. judicial system. In the article "Editor Removal Explained", DMOZ meta editor Arlarson states that "a great deal of confusion about

1365-453: A registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the domain name, only an exclusive right of use for a particular duration of time. The use of domain names in commerce may subject them to trademark law . The practice of using a simple memorable abstraction of a host's numerical address on a computer network dates back to the ARPANET era, before the advent of today's commercial Internet. In

1456-400: A set of special-use domain names. This list contains domain names such as example , local , localhost , and test . Other top-level domain names containing trade marks are registered for corporate use. Cases include brands such as BMW , Google , and Canon . Below the top-level domains in the domain name hierarchy are the second-level domain (SLD) names. These are the names directly to

1547-452: A similar topic were grouped into categories which then included smaller categories. DMOZ closed on March 17, 2017, because AOL no longer wished to support the project. The website became a single landing page on that day, with links to a static archive of DMOZ, and to the DMOZ discussion forum, where plans to rebrand and relaunch the directory were being discussed. As of September 2017,

1638-428: A single directory category. Similarly, catmod privileges are similar to meta , but only for a single directory category. Catmv privileges allow editors to make changes to directory ontology by moving or renaming categories. All of these privileges are granted by admins and staff, usually after discussion with meta editors. In August 2004, a new level of privileges called admin was introduced. Administrator status

1729-668: A special directory within DMOZ was created for people under 18 years of age. Key factors distinguishing this "Kids and Teens" area from the main directory are: By May 2005, this portion of DMOZ included over 32,000 site listings. From early 2004, the whole site was in UTF-8 encoding. Prior to this, the encoding had been ISO 8859-1 for English language categories and a language-dependent character set for other languages. The RDF dumps were encoded in UTF-8 from early 2000. Directory listings were maintained by editors. While some editors focused on

1820-589: A structured list to make browsing easier. Many web directories combine searching and browsing by providing a search engine to search the directory. Unlike search engines, which base results on a database of entries gathered automatically by web crawler , most web directories are built manually by human editors. Many web directories allow site owners to submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness. Web directories may be general in scope, or limited to particular subjects or fields. Entries may be listed for free, or by paid submission (meaning

1911-449: A text-based label that is easier to memorize than the numerical addresses used in the Internet protocols. A domain name may represent entire collections of such resources or individual instances. Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, also called hostnames . The term hostname is also used for the leaf labels in the domain name system, usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as

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2002-660: A unique identity. Organizations can choose a domain name that corresponds to their name, helping Internet users to reach them easily. A generic domain is a name that defines a general category, rather than a specific or personal instance, for example, the name of an industry, rather than a company name. Some examples of generic names are books.com , music.com , and travel.info . Companies have created brands based on generic names, and such generic domain names may be valuable. Domain names are often simply referred to as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners , although domain name registration with

2093-441: A variety of models adopted to recoup the costs to the provider. These usually require that domains be hosted on their website within a framework or portal that includes advertising wrapped around the domain holder's content, revenue from which allows the provider to recoup the costs. Domain registrations were free of charge when the DNS was new. A domain holder may provide an infinite number of subdomains in their domain. For example,

2184-469: Is sos.state.oh.us . 'sos' is said to be a sub-domain of 'state.oh.us', and 'state' a sub-domain of 'oh.us', etc. In general, subdomains are domains subordinate to their parent domain. An example of very deep levels of subdomain ordering are the IPv6 reverse resolution DNS zones , e.g., 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.ip6.arpa, which is the reverse DNS resolution domain name for

2275-414: Is a tedious and time-consuming job and is often outsourced by webmasters . Bid for Position directories , also known as bidding web directories, are paid-for-inclusion web directories where the listings of websites in the directory are ordered according to their bid amount. They are special in that the more a person pays, the higher up the list of websites in the directory they go. With the higher listing,

2366-521: Is also significant disquiet regarding the United States Government's political influence over ICANN. This was a significant issue in the attempt to create a .xxx top-level domain and sparked greater interest in alternative DNS roots that would be beyond the control of any single country. Additionally, there are numerous accusations of domain name front running , whereby registrars, when given whois queries, automatically register

2457-569: Is maintained and serviced technically by an administrative organization operating a registry. A registry is responsible for maintaining the database of names registered within the TLD it administers. The registry receives registration information from each domain name registrar authorized to assign names in the corresponding TLD and publishes the information using a special service, the WHOIS protocol. Registries and registrars usually charge an annual fee for

2548-459: Is nameless. The first-level set of domain names are the top-level domains (TLDs), including the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as the prominent domains com , info , net , edu , and org , and the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Below these top-level domains in the DNS hierarchy are the second-level and third-level domain names that are typically open for reservation by end-users who wish to connect local area networks to

2639-506: Is published on a download server, older versions are also archived there. New versions are usually generated weekly. A DMOZ editor has catalogued a number of bugs that are encountered in the DMOZ RDF dump, most importantly that the file format is not RDF. So while today the so-called RDF dump is valid XML , it is not valid RDF and as such, software to process the DMOZ RDF dump needs to be specifically written for DMOZ data. DMOZ data powers

2730-514: Is the oldest web directory. Most of the directories are general in on scope and list websites across a wide range of categories, regions and languages. But some niche directories focus on restricted regions, single languages, or specialist sectors. One type of niche directory with a large number of sites in existence is the shopping directory . Shopping directories specialize in the listing of retail e-commerce sites. Examples of well-known general web directories are Yahoo! Directory (shut down at

2821-496: Is to provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet . Such a move usually requires changing the IP address of a resource and the corresponding translation of this IP address to and from its domain name. Domain names are used to establish

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2912-569: The ARPA domain serves technical purposes in the infrastructure of the Domain Name System. During the 32nd International Public ICANN Meeting in Paris in 2008, ICANN started a new process of TLD naming policy to take a "significant step forward on the introduction of new generic top-level domains." This program envisions the availability of many new or already proposed domains, as well as a new application and implementation process. Observers believed that

3003-714: The Free Software Foundation objected to the use of Gnu in the name, GnuHoo was changed to NewHoo . Yahoo! then objected to the use of Hoo in the name, prompting a proposed name change to ZURL . Prior to switching to ZURL , NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released Open Directory data under the Open Directory License. Netscape

3094-428: The Free Software Foundation to refer to the Open Directory License as a non-free documentation license, citing the right to redistribute a given version not being permanent and the requirement to check for changes to the license. In 2011, DMOZ silently changed its license to a Creative Commons Attribution license, which is a free license (and GPL compatible). DMOZ data is made available through an RDF-like dump that

3185-527: The HTTP request header field Host: , or Server Name Indication . Critics often claim abuse of administrative power over domain names. Particularly noteworthy was the VeriSign Site Finder system which redirected all unregistered .com and .net domains to a VeriSign webpage. For example, at a public meeting with VeriSign to air technical concerns about Site Finder , numerous people, active in

3276-496: The IETF and other technical bodies, explained how they were surprised by VeriSign's changing the fundamental behavior of a major component of Internet infrastructure, not having obtained the customary consensus. Site Finder, at first, assumed every Internet query was for a website, and it monetized queries for incorrect domain names, taking the user to VeriSign's search site. Other applications, such as many implementations of email, treat

3367-462: The Yahoo! Directory . DMOZ achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001, and four million on December 3, 2003. As of April 2013 there were 5,169,995 sites listed in over 1,017,500 categories. On October 31, 2015, there were 3,996,412 sites listed in 1,026,706 categories. In January 2006, DMOZ began publishing online reports to inform

3458-436: The com , net , org , info domains and others, use a registry-registrar model consisting of hundreds of domain name registrars (see lists at ICANN or VeriSign). In this method of management, the registry only manages the domain name database and the relationship with the registrars. The registrants (users of a domain name) are customers of the registrar, in some cases through additional layers of resellers. There are also

3549-514: The Editing Guidelines, they are welcome to apply for additional editing privileges in either a broader category or else another category in the directory. Mentorship relationships between editors are encouraged, and internal forums provide a vehicle for new editors to ask questions. DMOZ has its own internal forums, the contents of which are intended only for editors to communicate with each other primarily about editing topics. Access to

3640-453: The IP address of a loopback interface, or the localhost name. Second-level (or lower-level, depending on the established parent hierarchy) domain names are often created based on the name of a company (e.g., bbc .co.uk), product or service (e.g. hotmail .com). Below these levels, the next domain name component has been used to designate a particular host server. Therefore, ftp.example.com might be an FTP server, www.example.com would be

3731-428: The Internet, create other publicly accessible Internet resources or run websites, such as "wikipedia.org". The registration of a second- or third-level domain name is usually administered by a domain name registrar who sell its services to the public. A fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is a domain name that is completely specified with all labels in the hierarchy of the DNS, having no parts omitted. Traditionally

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3822-476: The RDF dump offered to users. There were about 7330 active editors during August 2006. 75,151 editors had contributed to the directory as of March 31, 2007. As of April 2013, the number of contributing editors had increased to 97,584. On October 20, 2006, DMOZ's main server suffered a catastrophic failure that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. During that period, an older build of

3913-900: The ability to approve new editor applications, which eventually led to a stratified hierarchy of duties and privileges among DMOZ editors, with DMOZ's paid staff having the final say regarding DMOZ's policies and procedures. Robert Keating, a principal of Touchstone Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., worked as AOL's program manager for DMOZ beginning in 2004. He started working for AOL in 1999 as senior editor for AOL Search, then as managing editor for AOL's DMOZ program, and then as media ecosystem manager of AOL Product Marketing. DMOZ's editor removal procedures are overseen by DMOZ's staff and meta-editors. According to DMOZ's official editorial guidelines, editors are removed for abusive editing practices or uncivil behaviour. Discussions that may result in disciplinary action against volunteer editors take place in

4004-551: The addition of new listings, others focused on maintaining the existing listings, and some did both. This included tasks such as the editing of individual listings to correct spelling and/or grammatical errors, as well as monitoring the status of linked sites. Still others went through site submissions to remove spam and duplicate submissions. Robozilla was a Web crawler written to check the status of all sites listed in DMOZ. Periodically, Robozilla would flag sites which appeared to have moved or disappeared and editors follow up to check

4095-685: The alias The Cunctator , both claim to have been removed for disagreeing with staff about changes to policies, particularly DMOZ's copyright policies. According to their claims, staff use the excuse of uncivil behaviour as a means to remove bothersome editors. Senior DMOZ editors have the ability to attach "warning" or "do not list" notes to individual domains but no editor has the unilateral ability to block certain sites from being listed. Sites with these notes might still be listed and at times notes are removed after some discussion. Criticism of DMOZ's hierarchical structure emerged by around 2005. Many believe hierarchical directories are too complicated. With

4186-448: The applicant would likely mesh with the DMOZ culture and mission. A majority of applications are rejected but reapplying is allowed and sometimes encouraged. The same standards apply to editors of all categories and subcategories. DMOZ's editing model is a hierarchical one. Upon becoming editors, individuals will generally have editing permissions in only a small category. Once they have demonstrated basic editing skills in compliance with

4277-480: The ccTLDs combined. As of December 31, 2023, 359.8 million domain names had been registered. The right to use a domain name is delegated by domain name registrars , which are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization charged with overseeing the name and number systems of the Internet. In addition to ICANN, each top-level domain (TLD)

4368-589: The complete list of TLD registries and domain name registrars. Registrant information associated with domain names is maintained in an online database accessible with the WHOIS protocol. For most of the 250 country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), the domain registries maintain the WHOIS (Registrant, name servers, expiration dates, etc.) information. Some domain name registries, often called network information centers (NIC), also function as registrars to end-users. The major generic top-level domain registries, such as for

4459-401: The content being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain. There have been no similar experiments with the editing policy since then. Underlying some controversy surrounding DMOZ is its ownership and management. Some of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise. To varying degrees, those complaints have continued up until

4550-949: The core directory services for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, and Alexa . Google Directory used DMOZ information, until being shuttered in July 2011. Other uses are also made of DMOZ data. For example, in the spring of 2004 Overture announced a search service for third parties combining Yahoo! Directory search results with DMOZ titles, descriptions and category metadata. The search engine Gigablast announced on May 12, 2005, its searchable copy of DMOZ. The technology permits search of websites listed in specific categories, "in effect, instantly creating over 500,000 vertical search engines". As of 8 September 2006, DMOZ listed 313 English-language Web sites that use DMOZ data as well as 238 sites in other languages. However, these figures do not reflect

4641-440: The directory (at the risk of introducing lower-quality, less objective entries). Another direction taken by some web directories is the paid for inclusion model. This method enables the directory to offer timely inclusion for submissions and generally fewer listings as a result of the paid model. They often offer additional listing options to further enhance listings, including features listings and additional links to inner pages of

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4732-472: The directory was visible to the public. On January 13, 2007, the Site Suggestion and Update Listings forms were again made available. On January 26, 2007, weekly publication of RDF dumps resumed. To avoid future outages, the system resided on a redundant configuration of two Intel-based servers from then on. The site's interface was given an upgrade in 2016, branded "DMOZ 3.0", but AOL took it offline

4823-689: The domain name for themselves. Network Solutions has been accused of this. In the United States, the Truth in Domain Names Act of 2003, in combination with the PROTECT Act of 2003 , forbids the use of a misleading domain name with the intention of attracting Internet users into visiting Internet pornography sites. Web directory There are two ways to find information on the Web: by searching or browsing . Web directories provide links in

4914-609: The early network, each computer on the network retrieved the hosts file ( host.txt ) from a computer at SRI (now SRI International ), which mapped computer hostnames to numerical addresses. The rapid growth of the network made it impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname registry and in 1983 the Domain Name System was introduced on the ARPANET and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 882 and RFC 883. The following table shows

5005-474: The emergence of Web 2.0 , folksonomies began to appear, and some editors proposed that folksonomies, networks and directed graphs are more "natural" and easier to manage than hierarchies. The ODPSearch software is a derivative version of Isearch which is open-source , licensed under the Mozilla Public License . The ODP Editor Forums were originally run on software that was based on

5096-817: The end of 2014) and DMOZ (shut down on March 14, 2017). DMOZ was significant due to its extensive categorization and large number of listings and its free availability for use by other directories and search engines. However, a debate over the quality of directories and databases still continues, as search engines use DMOZ's content without real integration, and some experiment using clustering . There have been many attempts to make building web directories easier, such as using automated submission of related links by script, or any number of available PHP portals and programs. Recently, social software techniques have spawned new efforts of categorization, with Amazon.com adding tagging to their product pages. Directories have various features in their listings, often depending upon

5187-404: The first five .com domains with the dates of their registration: and the first five .edu domains: Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the top-level development and architecture of the Internet domain name space. It authorizes domain name registrars , through which domain names may be registered and reassigned. The domain name space consists of

5278-414: The first quarter of 2015, 294 million domain names had been registered. A large fraction of them are in the com TLD, which as of December 21, 2014, had 115.6 million domain names, including 11.9 million online business and e-commerce sites, 4.3 million entertainment sites, 3.1 million finance related sites, and 1.8 million sports sites. As of July 15, 2012, the com TLD had more registrations than all of

5369-650: The following year. As DMOZ became more widely known, two other major web directories edited by volunteers and sponsored by Go.com and Zeal emerged, both now defunct. These directories did not license their content for open content distribution. The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile online content has been successfully applied to other types of projects. DMOZ's editing model directly inspired at least three other open content volunteer projects: music site MusicMoz, an open content restaurant directory known as ChefMoz and an encyclopedia known as Open Site . Finally, according to Larry Sanger , DMOZ

5460-615: The forums requires an editor account and editors are expected to keep the contents of these forums private. Over time, senior editors can be granted additional privileges which reflect their editing experience and leadership within the editing community. The most straightforward is edit all privileges, which allow an editor to access all categories in the directory. Meta privileges additionally allow editors to perform tasks such as reviewing editor applications, setting category features, and handling external and internal abuse reports. Cateditall privileges are similar to edit all , but only for

5551-409: The full picture of use, as those sites that use DMOZ data without following the terms of the DMOZ license are not listed. Restrictions are imposed on who can become an DMOZ editor. The primary gatekeeping mechanism is an editor application process wherein editor candidates demonstrate their editing abilities, disclose affiliations that might pose a conflict of interest, and otherwise give a sense of how

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5642-677: The good faith efforts of their competition. Such allegations are fielded by ODP's staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices. In 2003, DMOZ introduced a new Public Abuse Report System that allows members of the general public to report and track allegations of abusive editor conduct using an online form. Uninhibited discussion of DMOZ's purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream webmaster discussion forums. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October 2007, Topix.com,

5733-530: The head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta had developed TASS , an ancestor of tin , the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. The original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence. The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After Richard Stallman and

5824-476: The highest level of domain names of the Internet. Top-level domains form the DNS root zone of the hierarchical Domain Name System . Every domain name ends with a top-level domain label. During the growth of the Internet, it became desirable to create additional generic top-level domains. As of October 2009, 21 generic top-level domains and 250 two-letter country-code top-level domains existed. In addition,

5915-406: The interest of the Internet infrastructure component for which VeriSign was the steward. Despite widespread criticism, VeriSign only reluctantly removed it after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) threatened to revoke its contract to administer the root name servers. ICANN published the extensive set of letters exchanged, committee reports, and ICANN decisions. There

6006-445: The left of .com, .net, and the other top-level domains. As an example, in the domain example.co.uk , co is the second-level domain. Next are third-level domains, which are written immediately to the left of a second-level domain. There can be fourth- and fifth-level domains, and so on, with virtually no limitation. Each label is separated by a full stop (dot). An example of an operational domain name with four levels of domain labels

6097-465: The listed website. These options typically have an additional fee associated but offer significant help and visibility to sites and/or their inside pages. Today submission of websites to web directories is considered a common SEO ( search engine optimization ) technique to get back-links for the submitted website. One distinctive feature of 'directory submission' is that it cannot be fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission

6188-410: The new name space created, registrars use several key pieces of information connected with a domain: A domain name consists of one or more labels, each of which is formed from the set of ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens (a–z, A–Z, 0–9, -), but not starting or ending with a hyphen. The labels are case-insensitive; for example, 'label' is equivalent to 'Label' or 'LABEL'. In the textual representation of

6279-442: The new rules could result in hundreds of new top-level domains to be registered. In 2012, the program commenced, and received 1930 applications. By 2016, the milestone of 1000 live gTLD was reached. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains an annotated list of top-level domains in the DNS root zone database. For special purposes, such as network testing, documentation, and other applications, IANA also reserves

6370-571: The non-English components of the directory had been greater than the English component since 2002. While the English component of the directory held almost 75% of the sites in 2003, the World level grew to over 1.5 million sites as of May 2005, forming roughly one-third of the directory. The ontology in non-English categories generally mirrors that of the English directory, although exceptions which reflect language differences are quite common. Several of

6461-445: The ontology of second- and lower-level categories has undergone a gradual evolution; significant changes are initiated by discussion among editors and then implemented when consensus had been reached. In July 1998, the directory became multilingual with the addition of the World top-level category. The remainder of the directory lists only English language sites. By May 2005, seventy-five languages were represented. The growth rate of

6552-484: The owner of example.org could provide subdomains such as foo.example.org and foo.bar.example.org to interested parties. Many desirable domain names are already assigned and users must search for other acceptable names, using Web-based search features, or WHOIS and dig operating system tools. Many registrars have implemented domain name suggestion tools which search domain name databases and suggest available alternative domain names related to keywords provided by

6643-509: The present. At DMOZ's inception, there was little thought given to the idea of how DMOZ should be managed and there were no official forums , guidelines or FAQs . As time went on, the ODP editor forums became the de facto DMOZ parliament, and when one of DMOZ's staff members would post an opinion in the forums, it would be considered an official ruling. Even so, DMOZ staff began to give trusted senior editors additional editing privileges, including

6734-965: The price paid for inclusion: A human-edited directory is created and maintained by editors who add links based on the policies particular to that directory. Human-edited directories are often targeted by SEOs on the basis that links from reputable sources will improve rankings in the major search engines . Some directories may prevent search engines from rating a displayed link by using redirects, nofollow attributes, or other techniques. Many human-edited directories, including DMOZ , World Wide Web Virtual Library , Business.com and Jasmine Directory , are edited by volunteers, who are often experts in particular categories. These directories are sometimes criticized due to long delays in approving submissions, or for rigid organizational structures and disputes among volunteer editors. In response to these criticisms, some volunteer-edited directories have adopted wiki technology, to allow broader community participation in editing

6825-689: The proprietary Ultimate Bulletin Board system. In June 2003, they switched to the open source phpBB system. As of 2007, these forums were powered by a modified version of phpBB. Domain name In the Internet , a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites , email services and more. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general,

6916-436: The public about the development of the project. The first report covered the year 2005. Monthly reports were issued subsequently until September 2006. These reports gave greater insight into the functioning of the directory than the simplified statistics provided on the front page of the directory. The number of listings and categories cited on the front page included "Test" and "Bookmarks" categories but these were not included in

7007-537: The removal of editors from DMOZ results from false or misleading statements by former editors". The DMOZ's confidentiality guidelines prohibit any current DMOZ editors in a position to know anything from discussing the reasons for specific editor removals, however a list of potential reasons was provided in the guidelines. In the past, this has led to removed DMOZ editors wondering why they cannot log in at DMOZ to perform their editing work. David F. Prenatt Jr., former DMOZ editor netesq , and another former editor known by

7098-446: The service of delegating a domain name to a user and providing a default set of name servers. Often, this transaction is termed a sale or lease of the domain name, and the registrant may sometimes be called an "owner", but no such legal relationship is actually associated with the transaction, only the exclusive right to use the domain name. More correctly, authorized users are known as "registrants" or as "domain holders". ICANN publishes

7189-420: The services offered, a feature that is used to manage the traffic of large, popular websites. Web hosting services , on the other hand, run servers that are typically assigned only one or a few addresses while serving websites for many domains, a technique referred to as virtual web hosting . Such IP address overloading requires that each request identifies the domain name being referenced, for instance by using

7280-561: The site owner must pay to have his or her website listed). RSS directories are similar to web directories, but contain collections of RSS feeds , instead of links to websites. During the early development of the web, there was a list of web servers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot from 1992 remains. He also created the World Wide Web Virtual Library , which

7371-531: The sites and take action. This process was critical for the directory in striving to achieve one of its founding goals: to reduce the link rot in web directories. Shortly after each run, the sites marked with errors were automatically moved to the unreviewed queue where editors may investigate them when time permits. Due to the popularity of DMOZ and its resulting impact on search engine rankings (See PageRank ), domains with lapsed registration that were listed on DMOZ attracted domain hijacking , an issue that that

7462-468: The top-level categories have unique characteristics. The Adult category is not present on the directory homepage but it is fully available in the RDF dump that DMOZ provides. While the bulk of the directory is categorized primarily by topic, the Regional category is categorized primarily by region. This has led many to view DMOZ as two parallel directories: Regional and Topical . On November 14, 2000,

7553-539: The user. The business of resale of registered domain names is known as the domain aftermarket . Various factors influence the perceived value or market value of a domain name. Most of the high-prize domain sales are carried out privately. Also, it is called confidential domain acquiring or anonymous domain acquiring. Intercapping is often used to emphasize the meaning of a domain name, because DNS names are not case-sensitive. Some names may be misinterpreted in certain uses of capitalization. For example: Who Represents ,

7644-479: The valid DNS character set by an encoding called Punycode . For example, københavn.eu is mapped to xn--kbenhavn-54a.eu. Many registries have adopted IDNA. The first commercial Internet domain name, in the TLD com , was registered on 15 March 1985 in the name symbolics.com by Symbolics Inc., a computer systems firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By 1992, fewer than 15,000 com domains had been registered. In

7735-582: The websites of many organizations on just a few servers. The hierarchical DNS labels or components of domain names are separated in a fully qualified name by the full stop (dot, . ). The character set allowed in the Domain Name System is based on ASCII and does not allow the representation of names and words of many languages in their native scripts or alphabets. ICANN approved the Internationalized domain name (IDNA) system, which maps Unicode strings used in application user interfaces into

7826-537: Was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter and DMOZ was one of the assets included in the acquisition. By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by DMOZ reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the URLs in DMOZ numbered 1.6 million in April 2000, surpassing those in

7917-447: Was addressed by regularly removing expired domains from the directory. While corporate funding and staff for DMOZ diminished over time, volunteers created editing tools such as linkcheckers to supplement Robozilla, category crawlers, spellcheckers, search tools that directly sift a recent RDF dump, bookmarklets to help automate some editing functions, mozilla based add-ons, and tools that helped work through unreviewed queues. DMOZ data

8008-465: Was divided into two main groups of domains. The country code top-level domains (ccTLD) were primarily based on the two-character territory codes of ISO-3166 country abbreviations. In addition, a group of seven generic top-level domains (gTLD) was implemented which represented a set of categories of names and multi-organizations. These were the domains gov , edu , com , mil , org , net , and int . These two types of top-level domains (TLDs) are

8099-469: Was granted to a number of long serving metas by staff. Administrators have the ability to grant editall+ privileges to other editors and to approve new directory-wide policies, powers which had previously only been available to root (staff) editors. All DMOZ editors are expected to abide by DMOZ's Editing Guidelines. These guidelines describe editing basics: which types of sites may be listed and which may not; how site listings should be titled and described in

8190-706: Was part of the inspiration for the Nupedia project, out of which Misplaced Pages grew. Gnuhoo borrowed the basic outline for its initial ontology from Usenet . In 1998, Rich Skrenta said, "I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy." For example, the topic covered by the comp.ai.alife newsgroup was represented by the category Computers/AI/Artificial_Life. The original divisions were for Adult , Arts , Business , Computers , Games , Health , Home , News , Recreation , Reference , Regional , Science , Shopping , Society , Sports and "World". While these sixteen top-level categories have remained intact,

8281-412: Was previously made available under the terms of the Open Directory License, which required a specific DMOZ attribution table on every Web page that uses the data. The Open Directory License also included a requirement that users of the data continually check DMOZ site for updates and discontinue use and distribution of the data or works derived from the data once an update occurs. This restriction prompted

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