How Safe are Internet Website Directories?
Recently, we told you that Dmoz.org, one of the largest user-edited directories on the Internet, is also one of the safest directories. Directories such as Dmoz.org contain links to hundreds of thousands to millions of sites. These directories are categorized by volunteers or through automated means. Many search engines, including Google, Hotbot and others, potentially use data from these directories. These directories are also used as efficient lookup services by thousands of web-surfers who want to locate sites which belong to a very specific category. Given the important role that these directories play in the Internet, one would expect that they would make an attempt to point only to websites which are “safe.” By “safe,” we mean sites which have not been injected with malware, via code-injection attacks or other attack vectors. We are not picking on Dmoz.org here. We were very impressed to see that none of the 2.8 million sites we profiled, were present on the Google Safe Browsing
