Despite the claims that ODP is a human edited directory, that’s not quite true. Today we expose a secret employee.

Robozilla is a webcrawler that periodically visits all the websites pointed to by the Open Directory Project. When a page has either moved or is not found, Robozilla notes this fact in the internal logs. Robozilla is a key to quality control, he occasionly runs wildly through the directory striking fear into editors as he creates the dreaded Robo-reds - sites considered to be out of commission for one reason or another. All these sites get unreviewed, to await a truly human editor to ensure that he was correct. Site that are working get returned to the directory. Sites that are dead, await an editor to try and find a replacment site - somtimes a URL has changed slightly and the web designer was too lazy to leave in place some redirects. Often the site was just down at the time the Robozilla checked it, sometimes no replacement can be found and the URL gets deleted.

An article from the DMOZ Editor Newsletter (dated 2000) When Robozilla Roaaarrs!

Robozilla’s editor profile