Our listing

[Guest]

For a couple of years our sites were listed as #1 or #2 on a search for "chinese translation," "japanese translation" and "korean translation." Recently we pretty much disappeared. I do not understand what has happened. The good listings with DMOZ were very important to us and I would like to get them back, if possible.

[Guest]

I'm not sure what you are asking. The site on your profile is still listed in Computers/Software/Globalization/Companies/Localization_and_Internationalization/ . If that site is the one you are asking about, are you looking at searches in the ODP, or in one of the end users like google. The ODP has no control over how data is used by end users (other than the attribution licence), so if thats your question I'm sorry but I dont have an answer. Someone else may know more.

[Guest]

I guess I did not make it very clear. The search I am mentioning is on DMOZ, not on an engine such as Google. Although our results on DMOZ do seem to be affecting results elsewhere.

[Guest]

Well all I can see is that the listing hasn't changed since March 99. If it was listed multiple times it may have been deleted from other categories as duplication is not generally allowed. There have been a lot of sites added since then, which may be the reason it isn't #1 anymore, but other than that I'll have to leave it for someone else to look at.

[Guest]

It's important to understand the ODP is not a search engine, and is not being marketed to the public as a search tool. The directory is a working prototype, which the end users take and apply their own search features to.

 

Our search is intended for editors to use to manage sites. Each user of the data - Google, AOL, etc. - has their own search programs. Our search doesn't affect their rankings at all.

[apeuro]

The search I am mentioning is on DMOZ, not on an engine such as Google.

 

The search engine on the dmoz homepage is highly irrelevant. No one uses it - only editors. It's buggy, oftentimes has difficulty finding sites that you know to be there, and really does not work well when you use keyword searches.

 

Don't spend too much time worrying about DMOZ search. Concentrate on the big players - AOL, Google, etc.

[hutcheson]

>>For a couple of years our sites were listed as #1 or #2 ...

 

It is very important to remember that ODP search DOESN'T RANK SITES!

 

It returns the sites in some random order, and nobody has ever published any kind of rationale for that order (or any way to affect that order, favorably or not, for any site). You could have the best "Chiral Handcrafted Widgets" in this arm of the galaxy, listed in 17 categories, cooled in 8 of them, deep-linked 400 times -- and STILL end up showing after some thirteen-year-old-kid's Madonna fan site containing nothing but a picture of her pretending to do something obscene with a CHW.

 

Trust us on this. No real search engine is going to do anything with dmoz.org's search results. They pay the big bucks for the directory and the links. And as for searchers, hardly anyone but ODP editors and webmasters does searches here.

 

Now you can get an amazing amount of information out of

that primitive search tool, if you know a bit about ODP.

And I personally do use ODP search to actually find

sites...sometimes the sites that I know I added last year.

But I very much doubt if there are more than 100,000 people

who have EVER used ODP search for general web searching.

(Yahoo will have that many unique visitors in an afternoon.)

And, last time I saw "page views" figures for ODP, "approximately all" of the day's page views could

have been accounted for by the number of listings added

by editors that day.

 

So, don't worry about trying to optimize for ODP search -- it won't work and wouldn't matter if it did. Concentrate on Google and Inktomi, with an eye out for new search engines.

[nickel]

<It is very important to remember that ODP search DOESN'T RANK SITES!>

 

That´s true and also true is that ODP-Editors have the possibility to "cool" some sites.

 

This cooling is no ranking, it´s a method to put a site at the first place of a category.

There could be several reasons why Editors are doing that, e.g.

a site has a special authorization or meaning to a category.

For example: Gouverment Sites, Official City Sites, sites

with an excellent optical quality or sites that have a very

special meaning on humans.

Many Editors are sparingly on doing that, because we don´t want to hurt anyone

and we are always looking for fair play.

[Guest]

My thanks to all who have replied to my query. Your answers have helped me understand DMOZ a bit better.