My intention is to embed Google results in my website. I don't want to customise the domain/s on which the search is performed or anything, just a 'bog standard' Google search based on search parameters I pass it.
2 questions:
How do I display google results on my website as a response to search criteria entered into a textbox I have?
Is there any legislation I need to take into account?
I know my second question sounds rather strange but I'm aware that what I'm appearing to do here is present content driven by Google as though it's my own so want to avoid breaching any copyright or 'same-origin policy' type thing.
What I've Tried/Ways I Know I Could Achieve This
Screen scraping Google's response to a simple web request with the necessary query parameters (but seems a bit excessive)
Google's custom search (but I don't want to customise anything)
I've tagged this question for some more context.
As it is mentioned here
you can use your own XML parser to customize the display for your
search users.
with an http request like this:
GET /search?q=bill+material&output=xml&client=test&site=operations
But it has a limitation on number of requests per day, 500 or 1000 I guess.
Custom Search can be configured to include the entire Web in its results:
From the Google Custom Search homepage, click New search engine.
In the Sites to Search box, enter at least one valid URL (e.g. www.google.com).
Click Create.
On the next page, under Optional next steps, click Edit.
On the Basics tab, under Search Preferences, select Search the entire web but emphasize included sites.
Click Save Changes.
In the left-hand menu, under Control Panel, click Sites.
Delete the site you entered during the initial setup process.
Related
there is this site https://www.delinski.at/ and it has a nice form where you can pick some values from dropdowns like Date, Number of Persons etc., and then submit the form. It redirects and I see the values on the redirected page link as parameters (if I have changed the defaults).
I searched for and tried several Form Plugins which all do not seem to work - most recent one (Form Maker) lets me design the form as I want but at the end I realized when I click on Submit, the values are not transfered to the target page (confirmed by Form Maker Support as work as intended). It's confusing because actually that should be a basic funciontality of a HTML form, right?
So I want to know if there are plugins where I can get a similar look&feel like the example given above.
That site is a Static Site Generated framework not WordPress. That site would also be very expensive to build cause that is all coded, and very well:)
You are not actually seeing a form there at all that is just how PHP natively uses the URL to navigate via a button.
Almost all the form plug ins for WP use the database write now and do not pass the parameters of the entered form as a php _ POST with a redirect.
I kind of think what you really are looking for is a faceted search feature
One of the best that comes to my mind is https://facetwp.com/demo/cars/?_vehicle_type=truck
Notice the car icons those are actually search buttons:) Of course you will have to build a template to do that neat stuff on the SSG site you linked but...
here is a really informative write upon how it works to get started.
I've implemented GA on our b2b site. It's strictly internal but we'd like to track behaviors of users to see if some of the sections on the site are relevant. So, it's working, but say you have
www.blahblah.com and you want to also track
www.blahblah.com/edit
www.blahblah.com/askquestion
Do you set up a filter for this? I did try it and not sure if it's working quite yet. Any info/advice would be greatly appreciated. I am brand new to GA.
Thanks
Not quite sure what you are asking.
If you want to know about metrics for the individual pages you'd go to to the Aquisition->Page Content reports. Overview will give you, well, an overview (you can use the filter box to look at the metrics for any specific Url), Content Drilldown will display a view structured by url hierarchy.
If you're after user behaviour you can create segments. If you want to know if somebody vistited the homepage and, after that, the /edit page you'd got to advanced segments (the arrow above the "Explorer" Tab in most views, click "create new segment", choose "sequence" from the advanced tab, choose page as dimension and "/" to filter for as step one, "/edit" as filter value for page two, enter a name for the segment and click save. Now you'll get all reports only for visitors who have visited those two pages, starting with the homepage.
There are a number of predefined segments, you should try them to see what they can do. You need a pretty good understanding of metrics and dimensions in GA to get the full value from segments, but the simple stuff (e.g. analyze differences between marketing channels) is already pretty useful.
So, for page performance seek out reports with page metrics and use filters. To analyze user behavior use segments which apply to most of the GA reports.
Hope that helps, if not you might to explain more specifically what you want to see in your reports.
You can create separate custom report for individual sections and drilldown by almost all the GA provided dimensions. please reffer the sampel provided.
Please access this URL in your browser as this is a predefined custom report which does the same thing you want. This will get saved under custom reports. You need to edit the custom report and give your own path/section insted of "/services/" under filters section
What I Wanted
I was going to use urls like /item/xxx (viewing an item) and /item/xxx/photo (viewing the full screen photo of an item) because I thought that looked better and was more RESTful.
Problems
I realized that I wouldn't be able to track total item views because the urls would cross over each other (i.e. you can see the total hits you had to all urls starting with /item/ but that would include the photo URLs).
I wouldn't be able to track the total photo views because the url would have the id before the photo part (i.e. I can't look at all urls starting with /item/xxx/photo
Question
Am I wrong? Can i still find these numbers (I'm using Google Analytics)? Or am I better off changing the URLs to /item/view/xxx and /item/photo/xxx? This is for an iPhone app so the URLs are really arbitrary (I can set them to whatever I want and no one will see them except in the analytics).
If you want to get metrics for just URLs with the /item/xxx structure while excluding /item/xxx/photo ones, instead of just typing text into the filter box, you can use the advanced filter option for 'Matching RegExp'. (Click on the text 'advanced' next to the text entry field).
And use a regular expression to exclude the /item/xxx/photo while also including /item/xxx:
Exclude Page Matching RegExp: item/(.)*/photo$
And Include Page Containing: item/
I've an ASP.NET page with a textbox and a option from user of the following choices: Wikipedia, Google, Dictionary.com, Flickr, Google images.
The user enters a word(s) in the textbox and selects a choice among the following.
Depending on the choice select by the user I wish to return the following.
Wikipedia: Return the content and link to the page corresponding to the topic about the word.
Google: Return the top 10 results of google search for this word.
Flickr: Return a few images atmost 10 images from flickr search
GoogleImage: Return a few images from google image search.
Dictionary: Return the meaning of the word.
How can I do that?
Since you are wanting to do some processing on the results prior to displaying them, your best bet is probably to invoke a web request on the server to fetch your results as RSS or some other parsable XML format.
So first up, we have Wikipedia, which has API support for open search, and queries with XML or JSON output. You can get the details of the API by going to: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
I would think either the query action, or opensearch action would be what you want.
Right, now there is Google, which supports search results as RSS through their Active Search feature. The link takes you to the main page where you can build the query, at which point it should be easy to drop in your search terms. There is also the Google Search AJAX API, which you can find out about here (See the "Flash and other Non-Javascript Environments" section for building the URLs directly. I believe this option should give you access to Google Image results as well.
For Flickr, have a look at this App Garden page. There are several output formats available to choose from.
I wasn't able to find anything real solid on getting results from Dictionary.com, but it does appear that they have an API. You might be able to dig through google and find some references on how to get search results as XML or JSON. There are also several other Dictionary sites which may have more information about their APIs. While searching I managed to find this SO question about word lookup from google dictionary.
Hope this helps.
Have an iframe within your page, and then set the src of the frame to the appropriate query string that you craft from the user's input.
This can be done from javascript within the page, in response to the user selecting something in the 'choice' dropdown. You can have the appropriate urls already embedded in the javascript (as variables), and just substitute in the user's input.
I inherited a Drupal 5 site recently and have a series of enhancements to make. Several of then revolve around search results.
Unpublished pages showing up in
search engine results. Some of these
are old pages, others are recently
unpublished. All are correctly
marked as unpublished in the CMS and
are still showing up.
Outdated pages are showing up from the search engine. The URL path structure changed and those items are old results in the DB.
From what I can tell the site uses Google Search Appliance(GSA) for the search rather than the default Drupal search. Is there a way I can be certain that it's using GSA other than seeing the module enabled?
If it is GSA it seems that I could get someone with access to the GSA to rebuild the search results on the site. Is this correct?
If rebuilding the search results is the right way to go about it, it seems whenever a fair amount of content is removed from the site I'll need to get someone to rebuild the search. Is there a better/automatic way?
Sounds like it's drupal that is handling the search. Google would need db access to show unpublished nodes. It could be you are using views to do search but forgot to only take published nodes.
If Drupal is handling the searchyou just need to flush and rebuild the search index. This can be done without too much trouble if you don't have too much content.
The GSA could still be showing deleted content depending on what your data source is.
If the content is coming from a database feed and is then dropped from the query it would be dropped. If the content was coming from a natural crawl or through a custom connector feed it would not be removed from the index on delete. Instead it needs to naturally cycle out of the index which can take a while.
One way to block deleted url's from being displayed is to do it through the front end. In the GSA Admin interface go to Serving > Front Ends then choose your front end and click the Remove URL tab. You can either list your url's or block a group of url's through regular expressions.
I have posted an answer to your more general question concerning node access. The problem with your search results might well be related to that.
In order to keep the Google Appliance more up to date, you might try out XmlSiteMap, a module that publishes a proper xml sitemap for all your content.
For an online website, publishing a sitemap is a good way to keep the search engines up to date, as they can use it to know about new pages and to purge old pages. I'm assuming that the Google Appliance would use this too,.