Posts tagged google

Always find the best topics and ideas

Mar 21st

Posted by alex in Tips

No comments

Google Insights preview

Google Insights Search

You probably struggle to find new topics, and once you do, it's really hard to know how to title them. We want them good, concise, and "juicy", and that is not easy.

Well, there are lot's of people that read guides on writing, that use this "amazing" titles that "grab" people's attention. But well, who wants to spend that much time only for that?

For us that write tech blogs, it's easy to find the right tools online, and we have them at our fingertips. Imagine I wanted to write an article about the iPhone, what should I write it about?

I will go to Google Insights and there I will be able to look at the trends for each topic. That is the real secret, what people are looking for, what the want, right now.

So in my example, I will search for iPhone, to see what people want to know about it. At a glance I can see the interest of people on that subject over time, the main world countries of interest, and the best of it all, the exact searches they make!

The top searches for iPhone are:

  • Unlock iPhone 3.1.3
  • TaskPaper for iPhone
  • New iPhone Apps
  • iPad
  • ... etc

So these are the areas of interest I should focus on. That is what people want, so that is what I will be giving them.

Another example:

Now you can probably start to see the advantages of this method. Let's suppose another case scenario, where I am an iPhone App developer, and I have no idea what to develop!

Let's see what apps people want, so I go again to Google Insight, and search for iPhone Apps, download app, and other keywords that will reveal the top searches for new apps:

  • PayPal App
  • SURFit
  • Spotify
  • White House App
  • Cracked Apps

So those are the top searches people make. Note that this are far from being the top apps, they are just what people are looking for. It's important that you distinguish this. When you develop something, it should be completely different from the top solutions that already exist. You must do what people need, and that is what they search. And once you have the idea, inspire its design and usability in the other top solutions for other problems.

Good luck with finding your perfect niches!

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Event tracking – Google Analytics

Jun 13th

Posted by alex in Javascript

No comments

Hello everyone,
As most people do, I'm sure you use Google Analytics for the stat metrics for some of your sites, so you'll love this new feature:

If you use AJAX in your site, or if you want to track outbound links, or downloads... etc then this is really useful for you.

What is event tracking?

In simple terms, it logs events that happen on your site, for example rate a post (If you have post rating), download a file... or you do some sort of JavaScript processing that you want to measure.

So finally, we can keep track of AJAX interactions with the server, we can log also normal POST requests that do some php processing, like posting a comment, or editing some data in our database.

Using Event Tracking:

This step couldn't be possible easier. First of all make sure you have the new code installed. The new code looks like this:

 
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-3181088-6");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
 

That var pageTracker is what holds the tracking object.

Example:

Imagine we have a site where we feature some sort of mp3 downloads. And we want to track those with Analytics. In the link to the file we would put:

 
<a href="song_file.mp3" title="Download file" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Music', 'Download', 'Song number 4');">Download song</a>
 

As you can see we use the function _trackEvent, from the pageTracker object. This function takes 4 parameters, Category name, action name and a label and value:

 
_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)
 

The category can be used to store different events that are similar, for example in the category music we could use the actions Download, Listen, Rate... And finally the label, that is normally used to refer to which specific object in that category you are referring to, in this case which song.

From the Analytics panel

Wait for a day after you install this to see the data in Google Analytics, and then go to the stats panel, go to the Content tab, then you'll see at the bottom Event Tracking:
I've created a sample profile with some events and I clicked a couple times to show you how it looks like:

Screen capture of the Event Tracking page

Screen capture of the Event Tracking page

Well I hope you found this useful, more information on the Google API

How do you use this?

Have you found any sort of smart uses for this? Please share with us :)

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Windows Live users being a bit weird…

Jun 13th

Posted by alex in General talk

3 comments

I use for my blog statistics both StatPress and Google Analytics, since both offer different things, and I was checking my referrers to see what do people search to get to my blog, to optimize my text and keywords to rank higher for those keywords, when I found a very strange thing:
Google users usually use relatively "complex" search queries, like the following:

round corners+design+js

how to make a php mirc bot

And that is (I think) the normal thing to do when you are searching right? So then I find that about 0.13% of the total number of visits come from Windows Live, although it is still a pretty high number. And I then in Google Analytics checked to see what were the keywords they were using, and it turns out that about 99% of the people that use Windows Live Search use only ONE keyword!
The arrive somehow to my site searching one word!:
urbano

little
easter
image
design
robots
...

These were the latest search keywords used, and I thought it might be a problem in the way StatPress and Google Analytics get the search query terms from the referrer URI, but when I did a long phrase search and clicked on my blog, the whole query appeared perfectly, so it is true that most Windows Live users really search one word...
Unbelievable, if I had never seen it I would never have thought of it...

StatPress stats for Urbano\'s Blog

Click to enlarge [In the picture I've remover all the visits from other Search Engines for clarity]

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Google AJAX search API

Jun 1st

Posted by alex in General talk

No comments

Discover a great way to embed really customized searches in your site, use the Google search API (Using AJAX)

Here I'll show you how to develop a simple "Hello world" sort of program, using the Google API and AJAX to search.
There are 2 requirements though you need to fulfill in order to access the API:

  1. Your web site must be freely accessible to end users.
  2. Google will upgrade this API periodically, and you must update your site to use new versions of the API as they become available. The Gogle AJAX Search API team will post notifications of updates on the Google AJAX Search API Blog. (http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/).

The second one is not that much of a requirement, but something you must take care of for your search to work properly...
So apply for your API key, and take into account that a single AJAX Search API key is valid within a single directory on your web server, including any subdirectories.
More information on the subject

So let's get going:
This is the HTML code of a website running the AJAX search:

 
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>Hello World - Google AJAX Search API Sample</title>
<link href="http://www.google.com/uds/css/gsearch.css"
        type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/>
    <script src="http://www.google.com/uds/api?file=uds.js&amp;v=1.0"
        type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script language="Javascript" type="text/javascript">
    //< ![CDATA[
 
    function OnLoad() {
      // Create a search control
      var searchControl = new GSearchControl();
 
      // Add in a full set of searchers
      var localSearch = new GlocalSearch();
      searchControl.addSearcher(localSearch);
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GwebSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GvideoSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GblogSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GnewsSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GimageSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GbookSearch());
 
      // Set the Local Search center point
      localSearch.setCenterPoint("New York, NY");
 
      // tell the searcher to draw itself and tell it where to attach
      searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchcontrol"));
 
      // execute an inital search
      searchControl.execute("Urbano's Blog");
    }
    GSearch.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad);
 
    //]]>
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
<div id="searchcontrol">Loading</div>
 
  </body>
</html>

So that is a simple page using the search, I'll now go through the code explaining it:

First of all, we import Google's CSS style sheet from its location:

http://www.google.com/uds/css/gsearch.css

Next we import the Google AJAX search library from its location:

http://www.google.com/uds/api?file=uds.js&v=1.0

And now with the search controls:
For the configuration we will create a function, in this case OnLoad(). This function sets up the controls for our search, and draws the searcher inside the specified div.

To start, we need a new search control, which we set up as follows:

 
var searchControl = new GSearchControl();
 

So we have initialized the searcher, now define which areas we want to search in, in this case most of them:

 
      searchControl.addSearcher(localSearch);
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GwebSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GvideoSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GblogSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GnewsSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GimageSearch());
      searchControl.addSearcher(new GbookSearch());
 

We are using local, web, video, blog, news, image, and book searchers.

For the local search to work you need to set a "center point". For it to work perfectly you could use php for example and geoip to detect the location of the user and use that as center point... In the example we'll be using NY:

 
localSearch.setCenterPoint("New York, NY");
 

Now display the searcher in the specified div (This could be any div in your site, simply reference it and it will draw the searcher inside it). In this case "searchcontrol":

 
searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchcontrol"));
 

This is optional, but if you want to see it working you can set up an initial search. If you want this to work from your own search text fields, use GET or POST vars and php to set up the script to search for a given variable...
In this case we will be searching for "Urbano's Blog":

 
searchControl.execute("Urbano's Blog");
 

Be careful with the above to always strip ", because it would brake your script!

And you are basically done, simply call the OnLoad function and you are good to go!

 
GSearch.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad);
 

Hope you enjoyed it!
Read more about this:

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The secret behind Google’s success

May 26th

Posted by alex in General talk

4 comments

Group of research finds out why Google has achieved such a level of popularity. Precisely his advertising tool "Google Adsense".

Apparently Google "blackmails" all the websites out there with a medium popularity so that they'll use their ad program. Whenever it finds a website running another advertising program they'll set their PR to 0.
And this is taking place specially among bloggers (You are reading a live example of it), using advertising programs that I won't mention here (I'm trying to get my PR back :S )Ted Murphy said,

"Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising"

There are thousands of blogs out there whose PR has been taken away by Google (Starryskye, mine, AndyBeard
... ) And this are just examples of people who have told me about it.

You might say that Google is doing it because "buying links" is forbidden, but that why don't they take away the PR of well known blogs like TechCrunch, they too have sponsored posts.

This is simply proving that Google's PR has degenerated into a tool for them to control the public, as they can use the power it gives them to undermine any other advertising business without any chance for them to answer!
There are already many options out there being developed to substitute Google's PR. Obviously all these advertising websites need to develop them since they pay according to the PR of the blog. In this field we can be sure that new PR systems will be developed, but what happens now with our search positioning?
Will we be affected by this decision? I can't even ask anyone to exchange links with my blog since I have a PR of cero, when I used to have 2...

I am asking all of you to blog about this, digg it, make the world know about this outrageous strategy by Internet's giant Google. We might not be as powerful as Google is, but if we make this issue known through out Internet I bet they'll have to change.
Bloggers unite ;)

Read more about this:

Enjoy,

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