DMOZ and Google - Timid Tandem?

Tacit for the bedfellows they were made out to be...

[Josefu]

Great news today - I got word on my site's listing in DMOZ.

Now for the oddness: the category I am listed in doesn't even exist in Google's 'DMOZ mirror' directory - and that same 'google non-existant' category has a page rank of... zero. After a bit of research I found that Google's last DMOZ synch-up was over six months ago - and that they updated their DMOZ listings a total of two times for all of 2003. Can anyone explain what's going on?

I am in no rush, as I had already given up on (rather stopped following the progress of) my DMOZ submission months ago while I still had fingernails. Since then and today my site is very healthy in the SERP's as things stand so no sweat.

Still, does anyone have any clear info about Google's stance on DMOZ?

[Josefu]

Perhaps I should have chosen a less corny title...

Moderator: My qustion was out of curiosity and not an urgent matter, so if this thread doesn't generate any interest feel free to axe it.

[tschild]

The Google directory's last update was a bit later than that - as a quick sample, changes that I made on May 1 of this year are in.

I suppose they are weighing the cost of more frequent updates (should not be more than a few man-days per update, even with extensive quality control) against the lack of notice that the general public (and investors) will take of the freshness or otherwise of the Google Directory. A case of "good enough" replacing "as good as possible".

[Josefu]

Again I add to my own post - I may have made a blunder in my vagueness about getting 'word' that my site was listed - this came from a friend, not DMOZ.

I had submitted to a DMOZ August of last year and had mentioned to a Japanese friend of mine that my site (submitted to a deep section of the World/Regions/Japan part of DMOZ) was still waiting. He had a look and wrote back that it was already listed - I was looking in the wrong section because of the abovementioned Google/DMOZ incoherencies. My friend looked by following the Kanji-in-URL thread of the DMOZ listing.

I hope I didn't stir anything up, sorry. : )

[g1smd]

Maybe Google will update more frequently now that all the data in the RDF dump is 100% UTF-8 encoded. Initially the data was in various encodings and that may have been difficult for the Google techs to import into their system.

Late in 2003 and early in 2004 there were a lot of encoding errors in the database while the encoding conversion was in progress. Many months, and a million edits later, all that data is fully converted and verified.

Hopefully that data will be much easier for downstream data users to work with, and it would be nice to see some of the directories with 2 or 3 or even 4 year old data go and get a new RDF downloaded and fix it.

Google does at least update every few months and so their directory isn't very broken. Sites with 4 year old copies of the database are virtually worthless, but there are quite a few of those out there still.

[Josefu]

Addendum: Google has recently updated its directory, although it hasn't yet given any page rank to the 'newer' categories. I'm not complaining, I'm happy to be there finally.

[g1smd]

I think that Google have updated 4 or 5 times so far this year now.

[Josefu]

...and looking at things a bit further, I see that you were right about the UTF-8 encoding making things easier for Google. There must be the reason...

Thanks for all your input : )