Once 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, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search, etc. We make updates of the data available weekly, but each partner has their own update schedule.

Open Directory is a good place to start searches, since you can continue the search on many different search engines without having to retype anything.

If you are using the Open Directory Search as part of a meta-search or aggregate search you may wish to disable some of the Open Directory's fall back search features. These features are:

By default the Open Directory's first search attempt is always an "AND" search, by inserting an implicit "AND" operator between all search terms. This can be over ridden by inserting a different boolean operator either "OR" or "ANDNOT". Logical operators inside a quoted search term are ignored. Quoted strings are treated as a single search term.
If there are no matches for the first "AND" search, the Open Directory search attempts the search again, but with "OR" as the default search term. This is noted on the search results page. To turn off the fall back search option pass the search CGI the added GET argument "&fb=0"
If both the "AND" and "OR" search fail, then the the search will attempt the query on the Netscape Search (powered by Excite). To disable this fail over search, pass the search CGI the added GET argument


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