BOTW

[jg_v7n]

Best Of The Web I notice are advertising as "The Internets oldest Directory" (see attached).

However this is of course not entirely true as the site was an awards site until 2003.

The domain has been registered since 1994, but in fact it has only been a directory for 3 years or so...

April 2003:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030410165611/http://botw.org/

Is this downright disshonest advertising, or a "no consequence" exaggeration?

[! Ask !]

Just market hype, yahoo could sue them because they are really the oldest internet directory.

[John Scott]

Wasn't aware of that. Interesting find.

[sitetutor]

LOL, I really thought I have heard about them back in 1999, but I guess it was about their original content.

[jg_v7n]

Yeah, "a bit dodgy" if you ask me.

[Lynn Terry]

Interesting. I have a few of their shirts, and they all say "Best of the Web, Since 1994". I never really thought much of it.

They are fun to hang out with though - great group!

[Aviva]

Well spotted. Heh!

[olddocks]

and, they say that since 1994, but whois shows that domain created on "July 2006". not sure about this.

[mistercharlie]

Did anybody bother to check our About Us page?

We have always been straightforward about our origins. The project started in '94 as a web awards, culminating that year in a presentation at the International W3C Conference in Geneva. We have never tried to hide our beginnings - we display a link to the archives of the awards in the footer of every page on the directory. We are extremely proud of our lineage, and have never acted otherwise.

The original classification of the direcotry was based around a best of class categorization. Seeing the commercial opportunities of a comprehensive directory, the growth has gone that route since '02. The infrastructure was built out (by hand, not an off the shelf script), and the reclassification begun, late '02.

The '94 / '96 discrepancy is based upon the fact that for the first two years, the site was hosted off of the University of Buffalo's website (as it was originally a project started by UoB professors).

I hope that clarifies any misunderstanding that may have arisen from this ill-researched post.

[John Scott]

Just curious, is did the ownership change from the time it was a award site?

[mistercharlie]

did the ownership change from the time it was a award site?

Yes, it did.

[John Scott]

By the way, welcome to v7n

[Aviva]

Welcome to v7n mistercharlie - good to have you here!

Thanks for clarifying matters.

[jg_v7n]

Originally Posted by mistercharlie

I hope that clarifies any misunderstanding that may have arisen from this ill-researched post.

Easy mistercharlie! It wasn't ill-researched it was just a general comment to establish the facts.

EDIT: I would argue that its not entirly honest to - with hinsight - assume that the "Award Site" was in fact a "Directory" also because it used "best of class categorization". Hmmm...

[John Scott]

Well, to be technical, the banner is misleading. It says "Internet's Oldest Directory".

[sitetutor]

Originally Posted by John Scott

Well, to be technical, the banner is misleading. It says "Internet's Oldest Directory".

So which directory is the oldest? DMOZ?

[John Scott]

Yahoo predates DMOZ.

[sitetutor]

As a web directory, Yahoo!'s quality is not that bad.

[jg_v7n]

Yahoo's date of inception is '94. Yahoo was getting 100k daily unique users that year, so it was well used even in its first year. Yahoo is easily the "Internets Oldest Directory" and should be credited as such.

DMOZ is copyrighted since '98, although I notice that the origional Domain records were created on 02-Jan-1999. The first Internet Archive record for DMOZ is for the 25th January 1999 22 days after the first Domain record.

BTW:

Originally Posted by me

"The very first search engine, the granddaddy of them all, was created at McGill University in Montreal by Alan Entage in the early 1990's. It was to be a list of available FTP files and their addresses - an archive - Alan planned to call this list "Archives", but plumped for Archie, as the fad at the time amongst Unix users was to use shortened and sometimes cryptic program and file names."

Originally Posted by me

"Matthew Gray's World Wide Web Wanderer was the first autonomous agent on the web, it was designed to track the growth of the internet, initially it counted only web servers but leter it started to capture URL's as well. The World Wide Web Wanderer was creating the first web database and Matthew called it Wandex, Wandex exploited the linked nature of the web, following one link to the next - exactly the same process that is used by modern Web Robots today."

I researched a lot of this before creating my directory, read here if you're interested...:

http://www.thisisouryear.com/index.html?p=history#2

[sitetutor]

Originally Posted by jg_v7n

The first Internet Archive record for DMOZ is for the 25th January 1999 22 days after the first Domain record.

That's when I first submitted to them, maybe in a couple of years the sites will finally get listed