The Open Directory Project (at www.dmoz.org) is run by volunteers, with the stated objective of building the largest human-reviewed directory on the Web.

They have built relationships with many of the leading search sites to provide their results as a directory backup to crawler based results.

There are also many minor search engines who use ODP data as a hook to bring people to the site in order to make sales of other services to them.

They are currently supplying results to the Google Directory , to the Lycos web site, Netscape Search and HotBot (now owned by Lycos) as Category Results, and to the AOL web site as "narrow your search" results.

There is considerable uncertainty about the future of the directory, due to significant changes at AOL. AOL own Netscape, which funds the ODP, and have announced (July '03) a reduction of staff at Netscape, and conversion of the browser to "maintenance only" status. No further new development work will be started. How this will affect the future of the ODP remains to be seen