juust ~ php oddities

The article about using Yahoo Pipes for Twitter ammo deserves an update. When I wrote it (june 2009), Google had not announced they would be listing Tweets on their frontpage.

I was curious if Google list tweets from an pipes account. The specific pipe does use Google News and other trusted news sources for it’s feed, so Tweets should rank high in relevance to the keyword, but I wasn’t sure Google allow automated accounts to hit the frontpage in Search.

I typed in “microfinance twitter” at Google Search and got this as result :

There she is : @NeoFinance, one of my accounts that runs on a Yahoo Pipe.

The account itself is small, 750 tweets, it follows 60 accounts, and has 125 followers, mostly microfinance related. No automated following scripts, just the pipe. I had it offline for a few weeks but restarted it last week.

Google do seem to consider Pipes-accounts acceptable.

About scraping results off of Bing : Bing use a set of about eight cookies. You can grab 200 results with php curl, as 20 pages of 10, but after the first 200 the Bing server checks for the cookie and for lack of one returns a blank page. I can fidget with the curl cookiejar, but Bing also offer a straighforward API.

Using the Bing API to list search results is easier.

Bing TOS : not for seo rank checks

In the last paragraph of the api guide, Bing give a quick recap of their TOS, you can do max 7 queries per second, and using the results for SEO rank checks is explicitly prohibited.

These following snippets (text source) are hence explicitly not to be used for bing search engine result page (’serp’) rank checks.

bing api with simplexml

So here is one for web results using php simplexml. The web api (which uses namespaces) allows for retrieving max 1000 results per term at max 50 results per query, you can specify the number of results and the offset, where to start grabbing results.

..and one for the pictures using php simplexml :

I actually like that api, I am going to use that.

bing api with json

Bing seem to prefer you use json, less bandwidth usage. After their example in the api basics guide :

Of course there is the old RSS-option, which doesnt require an appid but also falls under the api 2.0 tos, and a soap option.

other sources :
There is a bing api php class made over at routecafe, and a jquery bing plugin using json over at Einar Otto Stangvik’s blog.

The question about the trends script with trackbacks was wether a few hundred backlinks was worth the trouble, and it wasn’t. I wrote a second routine to grab the most common significant words from excerpts, and do a second search to grab better results and up to five trackbacks per page.

So I put that online, it grabbed 4000 backlinks in an hour and overloaded the host server.

Baidu, radian6 and google had stepped up indexing after I added sitewide tags and that didnt show up in analytics, the site got the trackback validations and crawlers and the server went haywire. It is a shared host, the resources are too limited to run that kind site on. I put it on hold till I find a solution for the hosting,

Google of course penalised the site with PR0 and dropped the domain from the serp on its main keywords, but in Yahoo it ranks about 20 out of 360 million result pages and in MSN it ranks no 1. I was thinking about adding a translator plugin and see if I can get some traffic from Baidu.