Working with the BING API requires an Application Id you can get at the Bing website.

Accessing the Bing Api in MsAccess VBA

In the the VBA Ide, through the menu Tools References I add a reference to the XML object library that contains the XMLHTTPRequest object, enabling me to make HTTP requests from VBA in the MsAccess database.

The simple part is the http request string :

Then comes the working part, sending the actual request and receiving the XML response (objSvrHTTP.responseText) containing the search data. I use a DomDocument object and XPath to get at the XML data.

First sending the request

then creating a domdocument and receiving the response in it

The response uses two namespaces and the data we actually want is in the “web” namespace, so before we start selecting nodes in the xml-tree we first indicate what namespace we want to access :

The total search result pages is a top level node in the namespace :

…but the good stuff is in the “WebResult” nodes in the xml tree, I can use an XPath reference //web:Webresult to access that node-collection and with a simple for-next iterate through the collection, selecting the single nodes containing the actual data.

I output to the Immediate window aka Debug (under View, Immediate Window or Ctrl+G)

What can we do with it ? Let’s make a table for date, keyword, url, title, description, position

and add some code to store the results we retrieve

There now that scratches the seo itch :

MsAccess stuff is a bit hard to put on the web as sample, so I’ll make a quick one in Excel and put it up for download.

Accessing the Bing Api in Excel VBA

there you go : on sheet 1 you can fill in your AppID and keyword, click the butt(on…

…and on sheet 2 you get the top 10 search results

It uses the cells B1 and B2 as named ranges for MyKeyword and AppID, and has the code in the enclosed module. It also contains one of my AppId’s so no querying nasty shit, please.

Before we start :

google scraping is bad !

Good People use the Google Adwords API : 25 cents for 1000 units, 15++ units for keyword suggestion so they pay 4 or 5 dollar for 1000 keyword suggestions (if they can find a good programmer which also costs a few dollars). Or they opt for SemRush (also my preference), KeywordSpy, Spyfu, and other services like 7Search PPC programs to get keyword and traffic data and data on their competitors but these also charge about 80 dollars per month for a limited account up to a few hundred per month for seo companies. Good people pay plenty.

We tiny grey webmice of marketing however just want a few estimates, at low or better no cost : like this :

Suggestion autocomplete is AJAX, it outputs XML :

< ?xml version="1.0"? >
   <toplevel>
     <CompleteSuggestion>
       <suggestion data="senior quotes"/>
       <num_queries int="30000000"/>
     </CompleteSuggestion>
     <CompleteSuggestion>
       <suggestion data="senior skip day lyrics"/>
       <num_queries int="441000"/>
     </CompleteSuggestion>
   </toplevel>

Using SimpleXML, the PHP routine is as simple as querying g00gle.c0m/complete/search?, grabbing the autocomplete xml, and extracting the attribute data :

I made a quick php script that outputs the terms as a list of new queries so you can walk through the suggestions :

The source is as text file up for download overhere (rename it to suggestit.php and it should run on any server with php5.* and simplexml).

At first you pay 98% interest and 2% debt, at the end you pay 2% and 98% debt. In the netherlands we have a specific regulation that allows for deduction of the interest payment from taxes, that benefits startup families and can lower the tax pressure from roughly 35% to 30%. After 20 years on average people make more money and can do without the deduct.

In the bubble one brand-new idea was the interest-only mortgage, where you pay the entire sum at the end when you sell the house.

There are arguments for it, and arguments to never go there.

That would seem amazing, average joe can refinance his 200K house and pays only 70% compared to an annuity mortgage.

Problem remains that in a free market the price is what the market pays for it, and if 50% of the market is the average joe population the market has a 1000/mo budget, through competition the market price of houses goes up :

Without the payment on the main debt, the prices on the housing market becomemore volatile. If interest goes up the prices drop, part of the mortgages can become a risk to the houseowner and bank, who can even lose their triple-A and that drives the interest up even more.

If Joe bought the house at 2% 600K and the price drops to 450K with 3% interest, Joe has a 150K net debt that is not covered in the sale of the house. 20 Joe’s is a million dollar problem. 200.000 Joes is a 10 billion dollar problem. We have roughly 3 million Joe families so we would have a 150 billion dollar problem.

A strong argument not to go there.

The second problem is the release of funds in the refinance round, the old mortgages were annuitary and some were almost completely paid. Selling a 200K 4% for 300K 4% frees 300K and that will largely be spent in the overal economy. It could amount to 300 billion for the netherlands, 20.000 per capita that is not structural growth.

The basic spend on housing, gas water electricity, municipal and state taxes, health insurance didn’t change, and much of the extra funds is spent on luxury. The baby-boomers were 45-55 at the time so they benefitted most from the refinance round, and could suddenly buy a Bavaria yacht for daddy, a timeshare pensionada home in Spain or Portugal, adventures on the stock exchange, music, computers, extra dinners.

With as result the yachtbuilders booming, expanding, entire new factories for ships, and now the entire demand is gone and half the companies go bankrupt. Construction of pensionado village in Spain and Portugal is over, sadly it was mainly the pension funds that invested in these projects (another reason not to go there).

Building capacity to satisfy extra demand in a bubble is a waste, there is no structural long term demand. John Maynard Keynes hinted at that, it is wise for a community to save money when things go well to support spend when things go less well, and choose a long term stable balanced growth.

In keynesian thought the state is the complement or maybe superego  of the population and in these phases increases taxes and cuts budget and spend on education, culture, health care to dampen excessive growth, once the economic growth slows down the state  lowers taxes and spends more. The state spend is complement to the populations spend and together they spend in a stable growing pattern. That allows for stable turnover for companies and stable employment, and would prevent building up bubble luxury overcapacity.

That remains a critique on my part, part of the crisis is caused by the egotism of the baby-boom. The baby-boom demographic segment is 30% bigger than normal, we have 6% “extra” population in that segment mainly in countries involved in WW2. When voting, they can outvote other demographic segments related to life phase issues.

The baby boom itself causes an independant extra demand in lifecycle related products of 30% in the west, and also a 30% drop in demand for these products as they move towards the retirement home. They could simply be used to catering to their own needs, for them the growth in business would always seem related to their lifecycle products, as if society actually shapes itself to satisfy their needs.

All in all, that makes the main search engine marketing tip for the next ten years Granny Gift shops on the web, lots of photos of happy little toddlers that make Granny happy, with $20,- gifts for Granny’s own grandchildren. Home delivery so Granny does not have to go out on the streets.

There is a 30% extra demand in the segment throughout the west (unless the pension funds go belly up). In 2015 there is 50% more demand for “happy 70th birthday” cards in the Netherlands.

Just some random thoughts.

I am going to get some coffee, I have a very stable coffee demand pattern that I *must* stafisy, my demand is very stable and long term a-cyclic.

Panda’s…

Latent Semantic Indexing

Queries, or concept searches, against a set of documents that have undergone LSI will return results that are conceptually similar in meaning to the search criteria even if the results don’t share a specific word or words with the search criteria.

LSI Test

O my friend, Panda is something that has to be surpassed. In {speculation|guess|supposition|surmise|surmisal|possibility|hypothesis} and keeping silence shall the friend be a master: you should not wish to see everything. (Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra)

 (source : semanthesaurus)

Let’s see if the Panda gets it.

I noticed when testing it with Twitter the whole key set is stored on the dev.twitter subdomain and not in the application directory where you register an application initially. When my first tests failed I think my keys were marked invalid, one working solution is revoking the application access and renewing the keys, then test again and it works. Once it works, it works flawless.

After registering an app at Twitter and getting the keys, it is a nobrainer.

If I build a site about “LCD television” and want to promote three specific brands/offers, I want Google to index the product/offer-pages as most important in the site, and not the index page.

How do I achieve that ?

Some basic theory : I have two rings of pages, one with four pages (B), and one with three (A), linked over one page (AB),

.

…after running that through a pagerank simulation, I get these results :

…the linking page (AB) sheds its juice to two rings, 3/5 vs 2/5, and by doing so drains the smaller ring. Being the only page that gets links and juice from all other pages, the ab-page itself scores the highest ‘importance’ in the website.

Conclusion : adding some subpages in a smaller ring to a page makes it relatively more important in the website.

Let’s add some more subrings :

The importance of the product pages seems to drop, but the ratio prod-n/home improves, so it works out better.

Home-links

By not linking back to the index page from the subpages, the product pages end up with a higher rank within the site.

If I do link from each subpage (S) to the index page (home) (what wordpress themes generally do)

…I get these results…

…the home page is indicated as most important in the site, which isn’t what I wanted, so I omit the home-link on subpages.

End of the sculpting session.

(note: this is, of course, all theoretic)

It is PHP MVC and, what sparked my interest, it has a plugin interface.
I love that, It could be going somewhere over the next few years.