Nuno Silva

Wikia Search Alpha is here

The alpha of Wikia Search website was launched yesterday.

Let’s see how Wikia Search will distinguish itself from Google. One thing is positive: it’s 4 four Organizational principals:

1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

quote from: http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia

Improving Your Adsense

Today I was reviewing my adsense and I was wandering if i could improve more the results that I show. So I started looking the web and found in Daily Blog Tips some useful suggestions:

• The ads with most performance are: 336×280 large rectangle, 300×250 inline rectangle and 160×600 wide skyscraper. Of course this ads may not look well in your site. I, for example, use the 200×200 small square because is less invasive to the visitor. I want to share my ideas, not publicity.
• Use colours that are known by user, like the blue (blue is associated with beginning of the internet). You can also use another colour, but that colour must be the same in every link in your page. If you use the color red in the links of your site, you should use the red in adsense links also.
• Your adsense should have colours that stand out in your page.
• Remove the “Advertise on this site” message.

I only posted here 4 of the 8 tips that Daily Blog Tips shared. Click here to the the full original post.

One other thing that I found is that you can improve crawler information gathering with a thing called “section targeting”. Section targeting is two Html tags that you put in your page:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Inside these Html tags should be the most relevant information of your site. For example, in a blog these tags should be placed around the posts. This way the crawler will only index the most relevant information of you site.

Of course this isn’t perfect. Google alerts:

However, please be aware that we can’t guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you’ve made to your site.

You can more information in the Adsense help center, here.

In Conclusion, there is no perfect way to improve Adsense. You only can follow some guidelines that may or may not improve your incoming. Of course that your incoming will always depend of your site visitors. If you have a lot of visitors and 1% of them find some relevant information then your incoming can be relevant.

In my case, if 1% of the people click in my adsense, what I would receive would be almost irrelevant, but in sites like Problogger ou Daily Blog Tips, if 1% of the user clicks in the adsense, then the incoming can be relevant. So the Adsense success also depends of how much people visits you site.

 

Google Search Appliance

Google has a tool for companies that consists in a server that craws all the information in the company and indexes it.

Today i passed all the afternoon playing (user perspective) with that little powerful thing.

The usage is simple. The machine is configure to have several types of indexes. So, when you request the information, the machine only returns the information about the specific thing you are searching for.

The Request is simple. Is a Http Request to the specified url were you pass, via query string, the information about your search (search key and several configuration parameters).

My implementation was very simple. A class, that i called it GSA (stands for Google Search Appliance ), with a method called Search. This method receives 3 parameters: the string to search, the start item and a filter parameter.

The filter is the more strange parameter here. It is used to return or the most relevant information, or all the results. The start item is the index of the first element that GSA must return( ie. Give me the elements starting at index 10). Finally the string to search… obvious…

When the Search method is called, i make an Http Request to the server, obtain the information (in a XML format), parse the information using Xpath, return the array of results to the class that invoked GSA (in my case a ASP.NET page) and render all the information.

Simple right?

Well, that is not necessarily right. The initial idea of the manager of my project was to copy a code of someone that already implemented a similar thing. Let’s just say that the boy that implemented it didn’t know how to program. Mixed all the fundamentals of programming (divide the application in Layers for instance). The boy inserted all the code in the Load event of the page, in a single method… no comments…

Unfortunately, in Portugal at least, the programming companies only want what we usually call a Code Monkey and, for that reason, the clients spend millions of euros trying to fix something that could be made correctly at first time.