Open Directory search is unavailable

Fairly frequently when I am searching, I'll get the result page which says "The Open Directory search is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later."

Is it that just that the site is too busy at that time, or is it that the site is going through some kind of maintenance?

<Move along, folks. nothing to see here. Just a troll viewing one too many sunrises, forgot his ray-bans.>

Search is distributed on several servers, at least one of them behaves funky all the time. Staff is aware of the problem, but as you can see no fix is available yet.

Try "shift-reload" until you reach a working server, or - because the search database is a bit out of date currently - use the search function on one of our data users sites like the Google Directory.

DMOZ site search has never been much good -- and you'll find that has been said on this site repeatedly.

Also, when it is working, it may be many weeks behind.

The definitive collection of DMOZ data is in the RDF download. It's straightforward enough (if a little slow) to download that and run searches against it.

Or use something like google, and do a site: search -- though that will only be as up-to-date as google's last indexing; DMOZ discourages spiders from accessing the site fast enough to keep their indexes pristine.

got it... thanks

gayboi said:

since the "DMOZ PEOPLE" say nothing at all is wrong with DMOZ.

Click to expand...

gayboi, I'm not sure where you got this from, but I think very very few editors would ever claim that there is nothing wrong with DMOZ. The list of improvement requests is long, believe me.

Meanwhile - back to the topic at hand - search should now be working better as of today.

(Well it's still out of date < Feb 22 >, but at least you get the out of date results more consistently and faster)