A question often asked is - when is the ODP more relevant than a search engine?

A reasonable question - considering that ODP claims to have less than five million sites listed, whereas Google has many times more than that number. However, in many cases, the results returned from ODP are biased, and those sites that should appear at the top for a search result end up getting pushed out by succesfull SEO work. Now when that SEO work turns black hat, then it can actually twist the results to be very incorrect and that’s not nice.

In a recent posting in an SEO forum, where the ongoing question of the relevancy of ODP was being discussed, another thread caught my eye.

Companies subvert search results to squelch criticism

This page alleges, that by massive use of weblogs, a company was able to influence the search results. It’s in cases like this that ODP shines. Maybe not all relevant sites are listed, but the validity of the listed sites is much higher than typical search results.

A search on ODP for Quixtar finds the following categories

Business: Opportunities: Opposing Views: Amway and Quixtar
Business: Opportunities: Networking-MLM: Amway and Quixtar

and one of the sites mentioned in the article AmQuix.info is right there to be seen. Now that is nice.