“Alongside technological progress in the search and navigation
area came an unexpected twist in 1999: a surge in Web sites’
reliance on search results compiled by human editors rather than
software robots….”
“Directories, offering mostly editorially selected and
categorized results, saw two major shifts this year. The more
influential was the rise of America Online’s Open Directory
Project, an open source directory based on information compiled by
volunteer editors. Dulles, Va.-based AOL acquired the Open
Directory Project with Netscape, which had acquired it with
NewHoo.”
“The open-development directory is based on the type of open
source software development projects that gave rise to the Linux
operating system and the Apache Web server. Products of open
source efforts typically are available for free and licensed to the
Internet at large.”