Google recently released a new REST API which will replace their old SOAP API (which they haven’t given out keys for since 2006)
This is very good news for those who want to do searchqueries “server-side”.
Documentation: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/doc…entation/#fonje
Video: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/20…om-outside.html
Here’s some PHPcode of how to use this API:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | <?php $url = “http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Hello%20World” // sendRequest // note how referer is set manually $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, “http://www.knark.com”); $body = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); // now, process the JSON string $json = json_decode($body); // now have some fun with the results… ?> |
Google has just released a new, very interesting API, check it out:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
Alright.. Settle down and take a look on those answers by google!
Google question: What’s the answer to life?
Answer = 42
Alright.. Thats not that impressive.. but..
Google question: How long can you play a 30GB iPod without repeating a song?
Answer: 18.2 days
Hehe.. Go google?
Google question: How many seconds in one millenium?
Answer: 1 millenium = 3.1556926 × 10^10 seconds
Yes sir..
Google question: How much hard drive space does one hour of 128kbps MP3s consume?
Answer: 56.25 megabytes
Let’s give them a tricky one instead..
Google question: What’s the answer to life, the universe and everything multiplied by the speed of light divided by three teaspoons?
Answer:8.51523871 × 1014 m^-2 s^-1
Pretty scary results, huh?
In this article we will compare the top 4 of the biggest search eninges ordered by market share. These four engines that will be compared are:
Google
Yahoo!
MSN Live search
Ask
In this small search engine comparison we will test with a quoted string and in future comparisons we will summarize with unquoted and some other types.
Instead of testing the results on a very popular term such as “news” we will use something more odd to see the differences more brightly. We will not manually review wich results that are the best but we will try to see the major differences between the results.
Let’s start with the quoted string “20th century furniture”.
Here are the following results for the term in the search eninges we measured (Only top 5 to shorten it):
Google:
R 20th Century Design: Midcentury modern designer furniture Mid-century design, furniture, objects, gallery and research. www.r20thcentury.com/ - 11k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this 20th Century Furniture 20th Century Furniture specialises in an international selection of unique and collectable lighting, furniture and objects from the mid century modern ... www.20thcenturyfurniture.ie/ - 10k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this 20th Century Furniture, 20th Century Furniture History, 20th ... 20th Century Furniture Designers and Furniture History. Individual designers showing their part in furniture design history. Find some examples of chairs ... www.interiordezine.com/index.cfm/20th_Century_Furniture_History - 32k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this Fears and Kahn 1950's, 60's, & 70's furniture and accessories ... Mod furniture and accessories. 1950 thru 1980 designer and non designer items available. Pop plastics, space age, and modern. www.fearsandkahn.co.uk/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this 20th Century Furniture and Decorative Arts 20th century furniture offered by this department of Bonhams & Butterfields includes the designs of Tiffany, Charles Eames, George Nelson, Louis Sullivan, ... www.bonhams.com/cgi-bin/public.sh/pubweb/publicSite.r?sContinent=uSA&screen=20thCenturyDecoUSA - 43k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
The Yahoo! results:
R Gallery International selection of lighting and furniture from the mid-century modern movement. www.r20thcentury.com - 10k - Cached 20th Century Furniture Latest In Stock. Services. Rentals. Delivery. Finding Service. Upholstery & Repairs ... www.20thcenturyfurniture.ie - 9k - Cached 20th Century Furniture, 20th Century Furniture History, 20th Century ... 20th Century Furniture Designers and Furniture History. Individual designers ... 20th Century Furniture Contents Gerrit Rietveld Bauhaus Mies van der Rohe Marcel ... www.interiordezine.com/index.cfm/20th_Century_Furniture_History - 31k - Cached =20TH CENTURY DESIGN GALLERY= Xavier's 20th Century Furniture features modern furniture and accessories from the 50's, 60's, Arts & Cratfs and Art Deco period. www.x20th.com - 5k - Cached 20th Century Furniture at Shopping.com Find 20th Century Furniture stores, compare 20th Century Furniture prices. Shopping.com helps shoppers find, compare, and buy anything in just seconds www.shopping.com/xGS-20th_Century_Furniture
MSN Live search results:
Mark Frisman Modern Furniture 20th century furniture designed by Edward Wormley, Robsjohn-Gibbings, Harvey Probber, Tommi Parzinger, Karl Springer. www.markfrisman.com Untitled Document 20th Century furniture, lighting and accessories from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. www.industriandesign.com Palumbo - 20th Century Furniture & Objects Reissued line of Parzinger originals and home furnishings. www.palumbogallery.com 20th Century Furniture, 20th Century Furniture History, 20th Century ... 20th Century Furniture Designers and Furniture History. Individual designers showing their part in furniture design history. Find some examples of chairs and tables created by the ... www.interiordezine.com/index.cfm/20th_Century_ Furniture_History Modern Living USA - Vintage home furnishings Sales of 20th century furniture, lighting and home accessories. www.modernlivingusa.com
ASK results:
Galerie Patrick Seguin | 20th Century Furniture & Architecture Galerie Patrick Seguin specializes in 20th Century Furniture & Architecture. It features works by Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre ... www.patrickseguin.com/ GOMOD :: Modern Furniture Classics, Vintage Design Modern furniture and design resource featuring shops selling Mid-Century modern, post-modern, Art Deco, 60's Pop and contemporary modern furnishings. www.gomod.com/ Lyons Antiques Specializing in antique 18th, 19th AND 20th century American, European, Renaissance, and Gothic furniture,as well as bronzes, and Royal Dux and ... www.lyonsantiques.com/ Victorian Furniture, European Furniture, Renaissance Furniture, ... Specializing in antique 18th, 19th AND 20th century American, European, Renaissance, and Gothic furniture,as well as bronzes, and Royal Dux and ... www.lyonsantiques.com/inventory.html Stevens Antiques 19th and early 20th century antique furniture and accessories, lighting and paintings. Photos, descriptions, location and contact details. www.stevensantiques.com/
Google: 2 with the string “20th century” in domain, three of top five has exact string in the title, one of them as all all three words in title and one of them only has “furniture”.
Three of the sites uses meta tags, which could indicate that google is using the tags less then the concurents. However, since Yahoo has results that are similar and they are known to use it, google could use it as well. One result only has 15 not so strong inlinks to the whole domain while sites places later have more then five hundred links that are both related and strong. We knows it’s weird, but in this case the inlinks didn’t seem to be valued this great.
+ Domain, title
Yahoo: Three of them has exact string in title, one of them has exact string in domain and one of them has “20thcentury” in url. Has about the same results as google which proves that they are quite close in their search-engine technology.
+ Domain, title
MSN: Two of them has exact string in title. One of the sites has the whole string in the URL.
One of the titles are “Untitled document”.
Acts pretty weird when having a untitled document in top 3 which is under construction. It does look like MSN weights meta keywords and description pretty much as they are used in four of the sites.
+ Meta keywords and description
ASK: One has the exact string in title, the rest are just furniture inspirated. None of them have furniture in the URL.
Seem to use both meta keywords and description as all five top results pretty uses keywords and descriptions heavily.
+ Meta keywords and description
Top 3 in google and yahoo is exactly the same and one of these appear in the MSN results, but none of them appear anymore. One interesting result is that Google, Yahoo and MSN had one MFA(Made for adsense) site in top three, which used both meta keywords, meta description, title in URL (double times exact string and three times “20th century”) and spammed “20th century furniture” pretty much in text using bold. The spammy MFA site has a couple of good inlinks but generally don’t that much.
The w3counter has published a report of the search engine market shares.
Note that there only are four “big” search engines and in practical there are only one big and two smaller engines.
The differences of the search engines may vary but google is consider the better in the majority of the results, but with that market share Google should have the most information and with more information you will easier know which information is the most interesting for a user.
Here are the top 4 search eninges ordered by market share:
1 Google 86.21% 2 Yahoo! 7.90% 3 Live Search 3.90% 4 Ask 0.25%
There were rumors that Microsoft wanted to compete with google by buying Yahoo! which means that they would have a total of 11.8% of the total market share. Google has 86.21% of the search enine market share, which is almost 7.5 times more then what Microsoft would have if the purchased Yahoo!.
Google have a very cool feature called “Keyboard shortcuts” which most people have never seen.
Instead of using the mouse to scroll and check the results, you can now use the keyboard to do it.
You don’t need to use the mouse anymore now! It’s perfect for those who uses a laptop and don’t have an external mouse.
The interface is the same as the original but there is a kind of arrow that points at the result you have selected, which will give you the possibility to open the result or just continue to the next.
Key Action J Selects the next result. K Selects the previous result. O Opens the selected result. <Enter> Opens the selected result. / Puts the cursor in the search box. <Esc> Removes the cursor from the search box.
All you have to do is to add “&esrch=BetaShortcuts” in the end of the url of the search to enable this feature.
Please try it, it is very cool!
I guess most of you already use google to find just anything, but with some additional commands you can find warez with ease!
If you’d like to search for some music by iron maiden, you simply write:
site:divshare.com mp3|wma|ogg Iron maiden
site:divshare.com mp3|wma|ogg means that you search on divshare only and only displays results with a mp3 file, wma file or ogg file.
To find some videos, you just replace the mp3|wma|ogg part with the extensions you want to search for, in example:
site:divshare.com mp4|wmv|avi|mov|flv Britney Spears
That will bring you some results with your favourite Britney Spears.
To search for archives, just use:
site:divshare.com rar|zip|exe
That’s a very easy but useful google hack.
The official google blog posted an article about 10 “little known” gmail features.
Most tips are quite unusual for most people I guess but most of them could be used efficiently.
The 10-6 tips are here: 10-6
The 1-5 tips are here: 1-5
The number one tip were a “Create event” function, the second tip was “offline chat”, and the third was “advanced search”. Three great functions I’ve never used.
Could be useful for somebody atleast!