Searches

I was going to do this as a reply in the Search Results Updated thread, but unfortunately the reply feature is not working (nothing happens when you click on the reply icon).

Anyway, it is true that the dmoz Search feature is not the way people generally get results coming from the Open Directory. However, people who submit do use it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well.

On another forum, we were having a debate about whether the Google Directory is the same as the Open Directory. As far as sites included, it is, because its only source is the ODP rdf dump. But people didn't believe that because they have sites that are in the Google Directory that they thought weren't in the Open Directory. The reason is that they don't show up in searches.

We're not talking lag time here; we're talking a defective search process. I was able to find example sites in the Open Directory by drilling down into categories, but there didn't seem to be any way to get them to come up using DMOZ Search. Would it be possible to get this function fixed?

You may have a misunderstanding of how the search function is supposed to work. It does not search on the contents of a site and was never meant to, it searches on the site descriptions, titles and URL only.

For example a site has a url www.rotting-tomato.com and a title of "Space Vegetables" and a description of "Provides information on mutant tomatoes in space"

Then a search on any of these will find it: rotting-tomato :arrow_right: mutant tomatoes :arrow_right: vegetables space :arrow_right: rotting space Note that the order of the words does not matter.

However a search for tomato eggplant will not find it

There is sometimes a delay between a site being added to the directory and being added to the search system.

The main intent of the Search function is not to find sites, but to find categories. Typing a list of target words helps lead you to the category[ies] that contain the sites you want.

I'm just curious as to why you are posting this here instead of in the internal editor only forums? There are about a million discusions about Search on the internal forums

The ODP search database is built from the weekly RDF dump. In the recent past it has sometimes been horribly out-of-date due to flaky RDFs and the ODP search database updating being put on hold during server upgrades. However, it currently appears to be reasonably current. Sites added after the last RDF dump won't appear in the search. If the sites you are referring to have been listed in the ODP for a long time then this problem should be reported internally (with specifics) as a bug. If it isn't appearing in search, it isn't in the RDF, and that is a problem.

Also note that the Google directory is currently very out-of-date. If a site is in the Google directory but not ODP, it was removed. When (if!) Google updates their directory, it will disappear there too.

What a fascinating mind you have - rotting tomatoes in space... hmmm I remember the Killer Tomatoes from Space!

Killer Tomatoes

Click to expand...

And if you search on DMOZ for that - it correctly gets you to the movie :warning:

You may have a misunderstanding of how the search function is supposed to work. It does not search on the contents of a site and was never meant to, it searches on the site descriptions, titles and URL only.

Click to expand...

Supposed to ... I have tried searching on what is in the URL, and nothing comes up even though it has been in Open Directory for a long time.

Searching on the URL is not a search function.

If you have http://www.mysite.biz it wont find a match for http://www.mysite or www.mysite or http://www.mysite.biz or www.mysite.biz , but will find mysite.biz - don't ask me why , that's the way it works.