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MosDex is a new open source search site which is powered from the Nutch core.
Why MosDex (in their own words)?
"Search engines are free to use like television is free to watch, but, like television programming, search results are subject to manipulation by the interests that control them. The only way one can be certain that search results are unbiased is if the technology which computes them is public. mozDex seeks to make high-quality search technology freely available. We also express concern about recent consolidation and termination of search engines out there and feel this is the best opportunity to bring an open search index based on open technologies to light."
Where does MozDex data come from?
MozDex.com was seeded from dmoz.org data.
Add Your Site to MozDex
You can Submit your site to MosDex free of charge. When you submit your site they offer advertising options on their site, and on your site (like Google AdSense) through http://www.gethitsfrom.us/.
Support MozDex
It is becoming more and more apparent that free only goes so far. It takes a bunch of effert to build quality comprehensive products. They provide a more rapid refresh for sites that donate at least $5. I was the 73RD donor so far. If you would like to donate to support the project you may at http://www.mozdex.com/en/donate.html. In addition they are accepting equipment and other donations.
MozDex Ads
It seems to me that the ads are not well targeted yet, as if they have yet to have a substantial number of advertisers, or sometimes they are chosing to hurt their own ad clickthrough rate and relevance by allowing untargeted ads to list above targeted ads. The top ad for 5 HTP was a hosting ad. It was followed by a couple 5 HTP ads...
MozDex Search Review
The results are a bit slow and the algorithm has a long way to go to find relevance. One of the interesting things is that they have a link which shows the inbound anchor text and another which shows the page scoring. Here is an example explaination for the top listing 5 HTP site. I believe it would be extremely beneficial if they provided links which explained each of the numbers a bit better...For example, most people do not know that idf stands for inverse document frequency, or what that even means. Currently you would be hard pressed to learn what idf was from their search results.
(found on ResearchBUZZ)
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comments
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We just updated the query parser to default to AND and we also made some changes to our paid listings so they're more relevent (an issue with our xml parsing hehe)
So your query for inverse document frequence now returns more relevent searches instead of the prior default of "or"
Hi Byron
Indeed those results are much improved... Rapid improvement. I hope it continues and wish you the best of luck
- Aaron
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