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.

Personally I hope one day Google split social and business search, deprecate the entire web2.0 social linking and switch to real time traffic data as ranking algorithm for social search, and restore the peer reviewed web for business search with a stronger focus on local and regional delivery and consumer reviews as an alternative ranking mechanism.

Current rankings are most decided on the seo-sem effort of companies and don’t offer end user review on an efficient product list or regional index (aren’t we lucky we have Google Adwords to help our customers find our offers !). Sites like 4Square are closing in on delivering search results on local area venues
using the mobile web, which is an interesting development.

[added 3-6-10] is that just me or did I suddenly notice Google doing a Beta for Social Search yesterday ? basically based on its own profile data, and sites and linkdata from my webmaster tools account (I am not unconditionally happy about that).

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.

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.

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.

Just give us your endpoint and we’ll take it from there, sparky!

I was going to make one of these tools to scrape google and conjur a full blog out of nowhere, as Christmas special, RedHat Seo. The rough sketch has arrived , far from perfect, but it does produce a blog and don’t even look too shabby. I scraped a small batch of posts off of blogs, keeping the links intact and adding a tribute links. I hope they will pardon me for it.

structure

I use three main classes,

…and two support classes

Target blogs have three texts,

routine

The BlogMaker class grabs a result list (up to 1000 urls per phrase) from Google, extracts the urls and stores them in SerpResult, scrapes the urls and extracts the entry divs, stores div-entries in the WPContent class (that has some basic functions to sanitize the text), and uses the BlogTarget-definitions to post it up blogs with xml-rpc.

usage

My highlighter tends to mess up text with div markers in it, copying off the blog may not work,
the full text source (about 500 lines) is overhere. Underneath I’ll list the main program loop :

notes

• xml-rpc needs to be activated explicitly on the wordpress dashboard under settings/writing.
• categories must be present in the blog
• url file must be writeable by the server (777)

It seems wordpress builds the sitemap as background process, the standard google xml sitemap plugin wil attempt to build in the cache (takes anywhere between 2 and 10 seconds), and apart from building a sitemap the posts also get pinged around. Giving the install 10 to 20 seconds between posts allows for all the hooked in functions to be completed.

period

That’s about all,
consider it gpl, I added some comments in the source but I will not develop this any further. A mysql backed blogfarm tool (euphemistically called ‘publishing tool’) is more interesting, besides, I am off to the wharves to do some painting.

if you use it, send some feedback,
merry christmas dogheads

I hacked a quick example together on a subdomain over at trends.trismegistos.net, just to be sure it works.

You can get a site to list http://domain.com/trend_title.html type url’s by using mod_rewrite, an apache module.

In the server directory of the application you can use an .htaccess file to set rules for file access in these folders. When the server gets request from browsers or servers it applies any rewriting rules you define in .htaccess to these requests.

I tried this one :

RewriteEngine On
sets the rewrite mechanism on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
tell the apache server that rewriteconditions apply to file-requests that are not an existing file (F) or directory (D). If the requested filename is anywhere in the servers file table, the server dishes out that file, otherwise it will try to apply a RewriteRule. Applying the rule generates a new request, if that returns anything, the server dishes that out, otherwise it returns an htpp-404 ‘file not found’.

The actual url rewrite rule is :
RewriteRule ^(.*).html /trendinfo.php?title=$1
which means :

• if any filename is requested that satisfies the mask ^(.*).html then

• take everything before .html
• add that as variable $1 to trendinfo.php?title=$1
• see if it sticks

If the browser requests http://domain.com/bob+bowersox.html, the server will assert it is not a file or directory on the server, and test the available rules. When it notices it the requested file ends with .html, it applies the rewrite rule and tries to access http://domain.com/trendinfo.php?title=bob+bowersox.

A browsing user does not notice a thing.

In trendinfo.php I wrote some code to handle the ‘new’ request :

…that outputs the Google trend graph on the url http://domain.com/bob+bowersox.html

I zipped the trends.trismegistos.net program files, but that might be a bit over the top, the download file contains a class that relies on a mysql table being filled every hour with new trends (by cron.php on an apache cron-job), parsing and storing the atom feed of google trends, and listing it as a cross-table in index.php spanning the past 24 hours.

You can also put this in index.php :

That lists the current 100 google trends with a link. If you use the .htaccess rewrite rules, the server reroutes all the links to trendinfo.php with descriptive urls.

I hope that helps.