14 DAY TRIAL // The Open Directory Project has reached the end of the line and will be closing on March 14, 2014.
DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project, used people to do what other similar tools do automatically - organize websites. The decision to put an end to this project isn't exactly a surprise given how everything is done with far less complications.
DMOZ has been around since June 1998 and it first bore the name of "GnuHoo" before making the change to "NewHoo." At the time it battled against Yahoo Directory, which was being criticized left and right for making it too difficult for sites to get listed on it.
Netscape acquired the project that same year and renamed it to Netscape Open Directory. When AOL bought Netscape in November 1998, the same month the first acquisition took place, AOL got control of the Open Directory.
Google - the beginning of the end
Given how Google also started off that very same year, it wasn't long before the world figured out that the end of human curation of web sites was near since the Mountain View giant made it possible to search every web page on the web with very little effort.
DMOZ continued to exist even after Yahoo shut down its own directory back in 2014. It's been a surprise that DMOZ made it this far, in fact, especially after all the others shut down since they became pretty much obsolete.
However, it's been a nice, long ride, and DMOZ will remain in everyone's memory. As SearchEngineLand points out, the NOODP meta tag will live on following the demise of the project. This was a way for publishers to tell search engines, Google included, not to describe their pages using Open Directory descriptions. Sure, at one point, even this tag will become redundant, but until then, it's something that will take people down memory lane.