After years of declining use Google pulled the plug on the Google Directory.

The Google Directory was based on the Open Directory Project (OPD),  a volunteer, human edited directory of the web that has been used as the underlying database for numerous web directories for years. Unfortunately OPD has struggled in recent years to keep up with the increased number of updates and submissions.

We liked the Google Directory because you could browse the listings in a category in PageRank order, meaning that the online magazines at the top of a listing, for example, had the highest PageRank. With Google’s Directory gone you can search for and browse through categories in OPD, but only in alphabetical order.

I haven’t checked to see if Google is still displaying the OPD site description as the description in some of its search results or not. In some cases Google may display the description for a site from the Google directory as the listing snippet (this usually only happens for home pages). However checking Google’s webmaster help pages I still see the following mentioned in pages that were updated since the Google Directory was taken down

“…the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results.”

For more information on this and how to stop Google from displaying the OPD title see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624#2

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