status of www.acidstainedconcrete.com

Please check the status of www.acidstainedconcrete.com submitted a little over 2 weeks ago. This site was ranked #1 with the search "acid stained concrete" up until the last crawl a few weeks ago then it vanished. This is the second time in a year that this has happened to the site. Could you please find out what may have happened. My site is totally gone from the search results now. Thank you for your time in advance.
Lawson E. Acid Stained Concrete

Your site has never been listed in the Open Directory. Are you talking about Google search results?

You'll need to tell us where you submitted it before we can check anything.

Do bear in mind that we have no control and accept no responsibility for any conceivable search results, no matter where obtained. All we do -- all we can do -- is maintain a directory, and list, say, your Bifurcated Widget Retail site in the ODP's Shopping/Useless/Technology/Widgets/Bifurcated category.

Repeat, we have no control over ANY search engine, even (or especially) the one at dmoz.org.

Yes... I am talking about Google. Isn't the Open Directory Project where Google gets its results. Because I HAVE been listed there for a few years now. When you searched for "acid stained concrete" in Google I was ranked #1. When the Googlebot crawled last my site then vanished from the search results. www.acidstainedconcrete.com

There are days, when I ask myself why we have to explain how google works all the time? Okay, again:

1) GOOGLE DIRECTORY
This is more or less a mirror of the ODP, made from an RDF dump that should be generated once a week and google usually got it once a month. Due to technical problems the last successfull RDF generation was back in April. So no updates since then [UPDATE: Oh, well. I'm not quite up to date. There was a successfull one right now, so if the data users decide to download it, they will be up to date]

2) GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE
This is a search engine where you can submit your site just as with every other Search engine. And like nearly every other search engine it spidersthe ODP and some copies of it. For more information how links from anywhere might affect your google listing, please look at the help on the google website.

3) ODP+GOOGLE
The ODP is in no way affiliated with Google. They just did what anybody else could do: Download the RDF and use it for building a directory. We can't answer any questions about directory.google.com since it is not our business.

No, the Open Directory Project is NOT where Google gets its results! Google officially denies it. Google is on public record (Search Engine Conference Dallas 2002 is where _I_ heard it) as saying the search results don't treat the Open Directory, or links from it, any differently than any other site!

Google gets its results anywhere they feel like. And they don't tell us where they got them, or exactly what they do with them.

And anyone else on earth, who wants to build search results of any kind, can use the Open Directory any way they feel like. We give it away free. They won't ask us for permission first, and they won't tell us what they did afterwards.

I don't know whether you were given bad information, or whether you simply misunderstood what you were told. But the fact is that we don't know about Google, and we won't know about any other search engine.

I'm soory that I'm not as knowledgeable about all this as you are. Please forgive me. However, you say that the ODP and Google are not affiliated, then why does it say you are on your website.....here is a qoute from your site. "Getting Your Site Into Portals and Search Engines Using ODP Data
If your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, DirectHit, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search, etc. We make updates of the data available weekly, but each partner has their own update schedule."
Why is it that when you go to Google to list your site it is a link to the ODP? This is totally confusing. There is no specific add url link for Google. If I have never been listed in the ODP then how was I ranked in Google in the past? I submitted through the ODP???

>> you say that the ODP and Google are not affiliated <<

Windharp said that the ODP isn't affiliated to Google, which it isn't. Google is only 'affiliated' to the ODP because Google uses our data. Other than that the ODP and Google are seperate organisations, and we know nothing about how they work. I dare say they know very little about how we work. Google uses our data, and that's it.


>> Why is it that when you go to Google to list your site it is a link to the ODP? <<

Because the Google Directory is based on ODP data. The Google Search system is based on their own data and has nothing whatsoever to do with the ODP.


>> There is no specific add url link for Google <<

Yes there is, it's at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

Google and ODP are not affiliated. The "partner" sites have no special relationship with the Project here. They don't ask us for permission to use our data; they don't tell us how they used it. [Somebody here just happened to notice that Google does, and we're happy for them to.] The whole point of the "OPEN" in "Open Directory" is that anyone can use it...even Google. (And lots of sites do use it.) The only requirement is, if anyone PUBLISHES it as a DIRECTORY (which Google does), they have to have the "ADD URL" links back to us -- so we can find out about those sites (and that's what you saw.) All this is described in the ODP "Terms of Use and License Agreement"

We've said your site was never in the ODP. (That's based on our records.) That means it was never in the Google DIRECTORY either, since [as we believe] it merely publishes the ODP listings unchanged (but rearranged).

Now, Google has a SEARCH ENGINE, which is a COMPLETELY different thing from a directory. And there is NO special connection -- none at all -- between that SEARCH ENGINE and the ODP. To them, we're just one ten-thousandth of all the world's indexable web pages, with links to another one-thousandth of them. Therefore 99.9% OF ALL GOOGLE-INDEXED PAGES DON'T HAVE ODP LINKS. And of the 0.1% that do, the vast majority -- well over 90% -- got into Google before they were ever in the ODP. How do you think we found them to list in the first place?
So we don't know how you slipped into Google SEARCH, except that (just like 99.99+% of all the rest of the world's webpages) it wasn't through the ODP. And we certainly can't know how you got out, because Google doesn't tell us anything at all about their anti-spam methodologies.

Clearly some of us are using the word "affiliated" in different senses. Rather than arguing about the meaning of the word, it would be better to focus on the real question "what is the NATURE of the affiliation/relationship/whatever between Google and the ODP?"

The answer is, from our point of view, NONE. We generate data, we say anyone can use it, and we don't even have any official or comprehensive list of the people that use it. There is an ODP category that lists sites we know about -- they may be related to us, but we aren't related to them. None of them pay us money. If any of them died tomorrow, we wouldn't even get sick.
From Google's point of view, the relationship is producer-consumer. We produce a directory, Google consumes it and republishes it.

Google has been asked about the relationship of the ODP and Google search. Their official answer is: The ODP is in no way different from any other site. Its pages' page rank gets calculated exactly like any other pages, its links get treated exactly like any other links. I can't imagine why they would lie. (Invent your own conspiracy theory here, but I'm not likely to buy it.)

I also can't imagine any way in which that answer was less than comprehensive. Oh, sure, Google shows the ODP category and site description when their search returns one of the few pages actually in the ODP. And their engineers may be busily imagining other clever ways to use the ODP data for spam control or whatever. But if so, they haven't even hinted at it to any audience I've been in. (Not that they would have.)

So take that for what it's worth. Get the difference between Google Search and Google Directory firmly fixed in your mind. Whenever you hear a rumor about Google, ask the rumorer whether they're talking about Search results or the Directory. If their eyes glaze over, add them to your list of people handicapped by being technologically clue-deprived.