Search just doesn't work

Step 2 of the submission guidelines says "Do a quick search in the directory at dmoz.org (the home of the Open Directory) to be sure your site isn't already listed. This saves everyone time."

I have tried and tried and tried to search over the last two years and I get

"Network Error (tcp_error)

A communication error occurred: "Operation timed out"
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time. "

I am using broadband (not superfast) and have tried in IE, Firefox and Chrome, and with different computers, but get the same result.

I seem to have seen this query before but can find nothing on it.

Can anyone suggest a way to search the open directory to see if my sites are listed or not? Even if it's an external search.

Help!

Chris

I've just run a few searches from the search box at http://www.dmoz.org/ and they worked fine (on my slow broadband).

If trying again still fails, perhaps try a different computer/internet connection?

If you're looking for a URL, omit the www and http - not that that would cause the error message that you saw.

Search not working

Hi Jim

Thanks for the prompt reply. It's what I expected, otherwise others would be complaining.

However, I have tried this on several PC's, using Windows XP, Vista Home premium, IE7 and 8, Firefox 3, Chrome 1.0.1, Opera, etc. I get the same result every time. The only difference is the time before the timeout - on IE7 it is 3 minutes, on everything else it's between 45 and 90 seconds.

My broadband is 512kb which is not so slow and everything else works ok. There has to be another reason.

Isn't there a work round?

Searches from http://www.dmoz.org worked fine for me too.

But I ran a Google search for "Network Error (tcp_error)" and found a number of reasons and a number of sites which appear to be knowledgeable about finding the reason and helping you to fix it. From what I found, your request is getting stuck somewhere between your browser and dmoz.org, and probably not reaching the dmoz.org server. You might want to do the same search on Google and see what you find.

Best of luck.