I'm not sure how DMOZ works?

Hello,

I see that my site is now listed in DMOZ but if I do a search for my site name, it comes up blank using DMOZ as the search engine. Is that because it takes time for the database to get populated or is it the role of DMOZ to categorize the site and the other engines such as google actually read my keywords and description from DMOZ and add my site so it can be searched?

My site is listed at

http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/California/Business_and_Economy/Computers/

My company name is Complete Systems Design

Thanks for helping out a newbie.

The public pages show live data withi minutes of the data being edited.

The search function relies on the update to the RDF file, which (according to multiple threads in this forum) has not been updated for several months.

Thanks for the quick response. Does Google use the RDF to get my web site or do they use it to also get my keywords?

Short answer: no, and no.

Google spiders dmoz.org to build its keyword indexes.

(Google also has a copy of the ODP directory, built from the RDF. I don't know how many people use it, but most people certainly use the keyword search first.)

Thanks both of you for replying - this is not important but I'm curious about DMOZ. Where are they located? What type of system do they use MS or Linux? What sort of database mysql, sql or oracle?

Ok, the ODP is actually part of "The Mozilla Organisation" owned by Netscape Inc (who, in turn are owned by AOL Time-Warner). The ODP (Open Directory Project - the "proper name" of DMOZ) servers are located within the Netscape server center in California (to my belief).

The entire ODP server(s) run on Apache webservers on a Sun Solaris machine ("Solaris" is a high-end UNIX operating system - Linux is a sort of "free" version of UNIX with a few differences). So - neither Microsoft or Linux. (I doubt Microsoft platforms would be able to cope with the load in a cost effective manner anyway - but that's my personal opinion).

Database wise - they tend to use the Berkeley Database system - mainly because it's free and for historical reasons. The ODP search system runs off a very very highly modified version of Isearch (again because it's free and for historical reasons).

More information about the ODP can be found on it's about page and the Press category - also here and here.

Why would you want to know all that information anyway? <img src="/images/icons/confused.gif" alt="" /> You don't need to know any of it to either add a site or to apply to become an editor yourself...

Thanks - I guess I just got more and more curious.

Why would you want to know all that information anyway? You don't need to know any of it to either add a site or to apply to become an editor yourself...

Click to expand...

As humans we are naturaly inquisitive, people in this industry (the web) are maybe more inquisitive than most others. I certainly want to know how the directory works and the spec of the servers and things like that.

As boe_d said "I just got more and more curious."

Craig

Educating the public about the roots of the ODP is never a bad thing. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />

Yeah, this is the "general issues" forum. If we get too many questions like this, we can set up a "technical trivia" forum. Until then, this forum is the place for them.