So, I've spent about 2 hours trying to get the I'm Feeling Lucky URL to work. It seems the URL doesn't like the periods in the search parameter, so does anyone have any potential tricks?
Search Value= 40.840.1/8Z
The first result in a regular Google search is the correct page.
Here's what I've tried:
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I&q=40.840.1/8Z
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I&q=40.840.1%2F8Z
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I&q=40%2E840%2E1/8Z
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I&q=40%2E840%2E1%2F8Z
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I&q=40%2F840%2F1%2F8Z
(That one was actually pretty close)
http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I&q=40%20840%201%208Z
And all of the above surrounded in quotes (%22)
The problem is that the I'm Feeling Lucky aspect doesn't work. It finds the correct results, it just doesn't navigate to the first result. I'm open to alternatives besides the I'm Feeling Lucky URL parameters as well.
I'm trying to implement this into a .NET application that provides employees with resource information, which is best received from the manufacturer's website(s). The trick is that the resources are from many different suppliers and the links need to be somewhat automatic. Basically I don't whomever manages the software to update these links. To navigate, I'm simply using the Process.Start("http://www.example.com/") command which uses the default browser to navigate to the address.
This post helped a lot by the way.
I wasn't able to get any closer than your closest one.
But if it helps, here's an alternative way of writing the "I'm feeling lucky" URL.
http://google.com/search?q=haimer+usa+40%2F840%2F1%2F8Z&btnI
What I did to find the right url is to navigate to google.com. After this I turned my internet connection off. I entered the search details and pressed submit. You can now see the url in the address bar, but it doesn't redirect you to the first result. You can now copy the url and see how google treats your dots and other weird characters.
So to recap:
Go to google.com
Turn your internet connection off
Enter search term
Press 'I'm feeling lucky'
Copy the url from the address bar
You can create a google custom search engine of your own, and either exclude certain sites or include specific sites only, use http://cse.google.com to do this.
There is a SO tag for google custom search
Related
I'm currently in the process of writing a REST API and this question always seems to popup.
I've always just added a description, quick links to docs, server time etc, but see now (after looking around a bit) that a simple redirect to the API docs would be even better.
My question is what would be the accepted norm to have as the root - '/' - "homepage" of your API?
I've been looking at a few implementations:
Facebook: Just gives a error of "Unsupported get request.";
Twitter: Shows an actual 404 page;
StackOverflow: Redirect to quick "usage" page.
After looking at those it's clear everyone is doing it differently.
In the bigger picture this is of little significance but would be interesting to see what the "RESTfull" way of doing it (if there is one) might be.
Others have had the same question and as you discovered yourself everyone is doing it their own way. There is a move in this direction to somehow standardize it, so see if you find this draft useful:
Home Documents for HTTP APIs aka JSON Home.
I've give this much thought and right now I either return a 404 page, a health status page, a dummy page or redirect to another page, mostly likely on within the organization.
An API homepage isn't something everyone should be looking at and believe me, it can be found. There are more people like me that love to inspect the browser and see how a website is performing.
I have this project where I need to know if a visitor legitimately arrived from a QR code. Document.referrer value from a QR code shows blank. I have looked at some answers suggesting to put parameter in the query string (e.g. ?source=qr), but anyone could easily add the parameter into the URL and my code would believe it is from a QR code (e.g. www.project.com/check.page?source=qr) . I have thought of adding codes to make sure it is from a mobile phone / tablet as secondary way to authenticate but many browsers have add-ons to fool websites.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
I think the best solution for you is creating your regional QR Codes pointing to:
Region 1) http://example.com/?qr=f61060194c9c6763bb63385782aa216f
Region 2) http://example.com/?qr=731417b947aa548528344fab8e0f29b6
Region 3) http://example.com/?qr=df189e7f7c8b89edd05ccc6aec36c36d
if the value of the parameter qr is anything other than f61060194c9c6763bb63385782aa216f, 731417b947aa548528344fab8e0f29b6 or df189e7f7c8b89edd05ccc6aec36c36d, then you can ignore it and assume the user didn't come from any QR Code.
Of course, any user can remove the source parameter. But at least he can't add a valid one, unless he really had access to the code.
...but anyone could easily add the parameter into the URL and my code would believe it is from a QR code
Well, anyone could also scan the QR code, view the link, and remove the source=qr from it.
Data collection is never 100% reliable. Users can change their browser's user agent, inject cookies with some strange values, open your page through a proxy server, and so on.
You could create your own device or App for scanning the QR-code. If you read the post I've linked, you will see that this is a waste of time and resources.
So, what is left is to make a solution which will work for most of the users. Appending a source=qr parameter to your URL seems to be the simplest solution. You could also link to an entirely different domain and redirect the request, so it would be more fraud-safe. But it will never be 100% accurate.
I'm a newbie at stackoverflow so please be patient with me :)
I'm trying to get access with the Google Custom Search API.
But I get return that I can't understand.
My query is like this:
https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?&key=********&q=red%2Bsox&cx=**********&start=0&num=10&cr=countryCA&lr=lang_fr&client=google-csbe&output=xml_no_dtd
And the result I get is this?
string '{"error": {"errors": [{"domain": "global","reason": "invalid","message": "Invalid Value"}],"code": 400,"message": "Invalid Value"}}' (length=172)
What am I doing wrong?
I want the result from Google to appear.
Thanks in advance :)
You don't have a cx.
Take a look at this answer
What happens is because this api is used mostly for adding a search option
for your site you have to specify you custom search engine (e.g. search only your site).
When you want this to search the web by code you need to do the above. Add a fake
site (where you would add your search textbox), configure it (search the web, or your site, or whatever else) and then delete the fake site
Update
Oh god, i just saw that. Sorry. Well the problem is that you start with 0. Valid is 1. Change start=0 with start=1 and i think you would be good to go. Take a look at this for valid values for the start parameter official page
I have a website and in my website I have, for example, a list of Audi models. I saw, using google webmaster tools, that my website appears in the google search by the word audi, but the target page was the 22nd page from my result set, not the first. I need my first page to appead, not my last (or middle), but I cannot tell google that this is a parameter, because my URLs are rewritten using mod rewrite. Any ideas?
BTW, I have read in a SEO forum, that it's a bad idea to use a cannonical tag. So is it really a bad idea in my case?
You can't force Google to do anything, however, they have made it easier to deal with pagination issues with a recent post on rel="next" and rel="prev".
But the primary problem you face is signalling to Google that your first (main) page is the starting point - this is achieved using internal link and back-link "juice" focussed on that page. You need to ensure that the first page of results is linked to properly from higher-value pages (like the home-page).
Google recently announced that you can use View All which will allow them to find and index entire articles that are normally broken up using pagination and display them all as one result.
I'm maintaining an existing website that wants a site search. I implemented the search using the YAHOO API. The problem is that the API is returning irrelevant results. For example, there is a sidebar with a list of places and if a user searches for "New York" the top results will be for pages that do not have "New York" in the main content section. I have tried adding Yahoo's class="robots-nocontent" to the sidebar however that was two weeks ago and there has been no update.
I also tried out Google's Search API but am having the same problem.
This site has mostly static content and about 50 pages total so it is very small.
How can I implement a simple search that only searches the main content portions of the page?
At the risk of sounding completely self-promoting as well as pushing yet another API on you, I wrote a blog post about implementing Bing for your site using jQuery.
The advantage in using the jQuery approach is that you can tune the results quite specifically based on filters passed to the API and playing around with the JSON (or XML / SOAP if you prefer) result Bing returns, as well as having the ability to be more selective about what data you actually have jQuery display.
The other thing you should probably be aware of is how to effectively use #rel attributes on your content (esp. links) so that search engines are aware of what the relationship is between the actual content they're crawling and the destination content it links to.
First, post a link to your website... we can probably help you more if we can see the problem.
It sound like you're doing it wrong. Google Search should work on your website, unless your content is hidden behind javascript or forms or something, or your site isn't properly interlinked. Google solved crawling static pages, so if that's what you have, it will work.
So, tell me... does your site say New York anywhere? If it does, have a look at the page and see how the word is used... maybe your site isn't as static as you think. Also, are people really going to search your site for New York? Why don't you input some search terms that are likely on your site.
Another thing to consider is if your site is really just 50 pages, is it really realistic that people will want to search it? Maybe you don't need search... maybe you just need like a commonly used link section.
The BOSS Site Search Widget is pretty slick.
I use the bookmarklet thing but set as my "home" page in my browser. So whatever site I'm on I can hit my "home" button (which I never used anyway) and it pops up that handy site search thing.