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Why not use Open Directory?

Yes it has taken a few days for us to hit on this resource. We have been included in DMOZ almost from the outset and it supports our position in Google but drives next to no traffic.

So we should be piling up the human checked sites into our search engine at a much faster rate now.

This exercise also highlights the benefits of the focused system we are seeking to develop - there really is quite a lot of dross and repetition in the Google listings which makes me think that they probably focus their effort on cleaning up the first three pages which would make a lot of sense.

We've doubled the number of sites included to 36 now.

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