“Re: Google's Weblog Tools Directory”

Honestly, this mountain-making out of every little molehill is just ridiculous.

DMOZ and it's hierarchies are a mess. It's a miracle Google managed to make use of them at all.

It's just more of Winer's on-going attempts to remain in the spotlight by casting everything as a conspiracy. It's sad, made more so to see you caught up in it (again).

-Bill Kearney

"Seth Dillingham" <seth@macrobyte.net> wrote in message news:Conversant-70976@truerwords.net... > Google's Directory of Weblog Publishing Tools doesn't include Radio, or Manila, or even Conversant. All of these tools can be found elsewhere in the directory, but aren't listed on that particular page. > > Frankly, I don't think it matters, but it bothered Dave enough that he mentioned it this morning. Not only don't they include his (er, UserLand's) products, but they actually list blogger first (Google owns blogger). > > Brian Carnell mentioned this on his site -- basically picking on Dave for not understanding that the Google directory is actually the dmoz directory with a different name. I responded to point out that the dmoz and google versions of that particular directory branch are quite different, and Brian quickly posted a correction. > > Google's directory is a re-purposing of the dmoz directory , but not a direct copy. They reorder the elements in each sub-directory based on page rank. That definitely explains why blogger is first in the list on Google, but not first at dmoz: blogger is the most popular weblog software by a huge margin, so it would stand to reason that it would have the highest page rank, and therefore would come first in the list in google's directory. > > This doesn't explain why Radio isn't in Google's version of that sub-directory (branch). Some have claimed that it's because they're using an old version of dmoz's data because the dmoz syndication system has been broken for a long time, but I disagree. Radio has been in dmoz for quite awhile: I used to edit the Languages/Frontier section, and remember checking to see where else Radio and Frontier were listed. That was last year, and Radio was already in the list of weblog tools. Google has updated their cache of dmoz's content since then: the changes I made in Languages/Frontier are in Google's version. > > Perhaps the problem with dmoz's syndication system is not global, so only parts of the database are being updated while others are not. That could explain this. > > People are also saying it's a page rank issue. Perhaps Radio is ranked too low, and Google isn't showing the whole directory, so they're being "clipped off?" Not likely. Radio might not be as popular as Blogger, or perhaps not even Movable Type, but not even in the top 36? No way. Check out this search for weblog publishing tools (which is basically the name of the google/dmoz directory). Radio comes in seventh, behind two lists of weblog tools (including Google's own directory page), a page about Movable Type, and a few other pages that aren't specific to any tool (based on the page titles, anyway). If Radio is in Google's copy of the directory (which is weird, but the only explanation besides Google being so scared of little UserLand's competition that they pulled them out), then it should be near the top of the list. > > Unfortunately, Google doesn't usually respond to mere mortals when asked questions about how/why things are the way they are in their directory, so Dave isn't likely to get an answer any time soon. (Neither am I, but now that I've written this I'm going back to not caring much about the directories. ;-) They're not very useful, and they don't generate much traffic at all.) >