Hi everybody, I'd like to ask is it feasible to send queries to dmoz via my code and get the results to use them later in my program?? if it is feasible how can I do this? thx -- Nermine
If the question is as Pipes reads it (that's what I see too)... you can use their data courtesy of a free RDF dump, but it requires attribution. Here's a page that tells about the rules and availability, including a link to a how-to FAQ: http://rdf.dmoz.org/ . That'd allow you to use a snapshot of their directory. Don't know of any way to tap the realtime version, but it'd be a violation of their TOS if you did so. FTR - There's a forum specifically for Dmoz related questions... (wear your flame retardant britches if you go there). It's a subforum of the Directories forum created for essentially the same reason you have fences at the zoo.
I guess you are talking about data mining; yeah you can do it but at your own risk! I wonder - mining the whole DMOZ would take time and load on your server that you can't imagine!
hi again thanks very much for the replies... but what I really mean actually is that I need to use dmoz somehow like a searching engine... I mean that when I open dmoz website I find a search control and I can search for any topic inside dmoz directories and get a page of the results of my search... I want to do the same but from within my code... I don't know if RDF could help me do so, robjones... and I'm sure gbit that mining dmoz is miserable that's why I want to use their searching capabilities in a way or another... actually my application is a desktop application not a website too pipes... that's why I'm having a problem actually we are developing a focused crawler, but all I want from this step is to get 5 to 10 URLs that are strongly related to a certain topic I'm searching for, in order to use them as initial seeds to start crawling from those links or URLs... so I'm searching for some way that may help me query any searching engine or open directory from my code and get the first, say, 10 URLs returned in the result to use them as initial crawling seeds... can anybody help me? thx and sorry for my long message...