Does Google trust Dmoz?
Google has been hurt by all the people trying to deceive it, faking popularity to rise in the search results. Link-buying and suchlike have undermined PageRank – the very foundation of Google. So when Google trademarked the name TrustRank, it was widely assumed to be a replacement for PageRank. As it happens, Yahoo personnel were simultaneously playing with a theory they called TrustRank. The idea is to have a secret list of trusted sites. A link from one of them would convey trust. So the two were confused until Matt Cutts of Google revealed in December 2007 that Google’s TrustRank was an anti-phishing filter. Until this bubble was burst, there was fevered speculation about the sites Google trusts. Many a finger was pointed at Dmoz, though the paper on TrustRank selected seed sites with content firmly under the control of a body such as a government, university or corporation. Dmoz is run by volunteers. That’s not to say that Google can’t use Dmoz data in some other way. In its endles
