Community-Based Search Engines

Below is a list of search engines where volunteers or members of a community help create the listings, such as by managing categories or submitting sites they like.

Open Directory
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Netscape-owner AOL also uses Open Directory information, as does Google. All of these services are described more on the Major Search Engines page.

Zeal
Volunteer-driven directory where the community submits and rates web sites. Zeal is owned by LookSmart and provides listings for LookSmart’s non-commercial categories. See the Major Search Engines page for more about LookSmart.

Wondir
Wondir is a different kind of information service that seeks to unify cutting edge search technology with the web’s original egalitarian vision of people freely helping people. For a review, also see this article from Search Engine Watch: The Wondir Search Engine Needs Your Help.

IllumiRate
Community-driving directory that’s built off the old HotRate database but with completely different management and staff.

Related reading

seo and ux
mighty morphin power rangers
Methods-Unsound-meta-description-on-facebook
hp Google
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2064289/community-based-search-engines
searchenginewatch.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-22
59498
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QSNJA5ERRS2G43YGMJ47YOEBV2ZFQHYY
<urn:uuid:2d2bb884-2f47-4598-ba4d-f03fcc6464c6>
2016-05-28T20:20:20Z
195.110.76.232
sha1:6KDHC2A6IWUIVFRM3VHG65YG5WQL2A2N
<urn:uuid:84588491-ade5-4854-9f37-8d3f540c6656>
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2064289/community-based-search-engines
length
response
<urn:uuid:43158d98-9109-4e2e-bc93-afd32bcd80b4>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-217-139.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf