Posts tagged search

Always find the best topics and ideas

0
688 days
by in Tips
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!

Google AJAX search API

2
1347 days
by in General talk, Javascript, Programming, Reviews

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!
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