maven v3.0.5 cannot find sqoop artifact

maven v3.0.5 cannot find sqoop artifact

i am trying to build my project with maven v3.0.5 and jdk 1.7. snippets of
my pom xml looks like the following.
<properties>
<sqoop.version>1.4.4</sqoop.version>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.sqoop</groupId>
<artifactId>sqoop</artifactId>
<version>${sqoop.version}</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
when i run "mvn clean package" i see the following error:
Could not find artifact org.apache.sqoop:sqoop:jar:1.4.4 in central
(http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2)
usually and typically, i go to mvnrepository.com, and search for
artifacts, and whatever artifacts i can find there, i have always been
able to simply reference them in my pom.xml. according to this link,
http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.sqoop/sqoop/1.4.4, this
artifact should exist?
i can't really browse http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2.
Browsing for this directory has been disabled.
View this directory's contents on http://search.maven.org instead.
so i decided to use the search site for sqoop.
http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Csqoop
it seems to me that this artifact exists, but somehow, i can't access it.
any ideas on what i'm doing wrong?