The Open Directory Project is a co-operatively edited directory of the web, launched in the nineties by Netscape to counter the Yahoo! directory behemoth, and since adopted by hundreds of portal sites as the basis for their content.
The highest profile ODP user is Google. If a site is listed in the ODP, Google uses the ODP description of the site in search results. Here’s how Knox appears in Google:
Too bad the description is completely wrong. Knox isn’t a compression utility and Knox doesn’t sync. If I encountered that link when looking for encryption utility, I’d just skip to the next one. I’m afraid people do just that.
In theory, help is near: just visit the directory page for the offending entry, hit “Update listing”, and plead your case. Right after I did just that, the volunteer editor of the Mac OS Security category quit. I can just assume that my update request was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So to fix Google’s glaringly wrong description of our flagship product, we’d now need a volunteer to take up the job of managing the Mac OS Security category, hope that this person agrees to change the description of the Knox site, and then wait something like a month or two (or three) for the change to propagate to the users of the data, including Google. Sigh.
Would anyone here like to volunteer for step one?
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