I'm trying to find out if there is a programmatic way to determine how far down in a search engine's search results my site shows up for given keywords. For example, my query would provide my domain name, and keywords, and the result would return a say 94 indicating that my site was the 94th result. I'm specifically interested in how to do this with google but also interested in Bing and Yahoo.
No.
There is no programmatic access to such data. People generally roll out their own version of such trackers. Get the Google search page and use regexes to find your position. But now different results are show in different geographies and results are personalize.
gl=us parameter will help you getting results from US, you can change geography accordingly to get the results.
Before creating this from scratch, you may want to save yourself some time (and money) by using a service that does exactly that [and more]: Ginzametrics.
They have a free plan (so you can test if it fits your requirements and check if it's really worth creating your own tool), an API and can even import data from Google Analytics.
Related
I'm trying to organize a solr search engine. I've already set up the misspelling system and the suggestions.
However I can't seem to find how to retrieve the top 10 most searched words/terms/keywords in solr/lucene. How can I get this? I want to display those on my homepage.
Solr does not provide this kind of feature out of the box. There is the StatsComponent, that provides you with all kind of statistics, but all of those are numeric only.
Depending on how you access solr (directly or via your own app) you could intercept all calls an log the query string. I did this in a recent project where I logged a queries to a database. If you submit all keywords to an other core on your solr server, you can faceting queries on your search terms as described by Hyque
You could use a facet for retrieving the Top X words like this:
http://yourservergoeshere/solr/select?q=*&wt=xml&indent=true&facet=true&facet.query=*&facet.field=message&facet.limit=10&facet.minCount=1
The value of facet.field depends on the field you like to search in. With facet.limit you'll (obviously) limit the amount of results to 10. You'll find the facet results at the end of the results, starting with "facet_counts"
Edit: I really should go to bed earlier. I didn't see the "most searched" in your question. Sorry for that.
Apache Solr does not provide any such capability as of today. There is a desire for this and a JIRA ticket corresponding to it. You can vote for it if you'd like to see it in Solr some day: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-10359.
The stats component provides information around statistics, but it's mostly numeric in nature. You could parse server logs and come up with a way to build a Frequently Searched Terms (e.g. pump those logs in SiLK or Kibana for visualization).
If you have the ability to change the front end and add some javascript code to the UI or can intercept the search request and make an async or batch calls to APIs for tracking, you can use SearchStax Analytics that provides Search Analytics that tracks searches, clicks, cart actions, revenue, etc.
Is it possible to create a Kapow Robot that can search Google for the Operating hours of the Businesses from our list/database and update the timings if changes are made?
Please share if there are any other more efficient ways than the KAPOW robot that can be implemented with minimal effort and cost-effectiveness.
That's what the Google Places API is there for. While you could in theory just open Google Maps in a Load Page action, enter the query string and then parse the results, I would advise against it. Here's why:
The API will be faster, returning results in a structured manner (JSON)
Kapow has actions for calling RESTful services and parsing/modifying JSON
Google does not like robots parsing their pages, and most likely will lock you out (i.e. present you with Captchas sooner or later)
If you decide to go for the API, here's what you should do:
Get your API key first, see this page for details: https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/get-api-key. Note that the free plan allows for 1,000 requests within a 24-hours limit (https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/usage)
Maintain the place ids for all the businesses you'd like to query regularly, and update your list.
For each place, retrieve the details as described in the API documentation. The opening hours will be within the JSON response: https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details
Update your list. I'd recommend using a definite type in Kapow for that, and using the actions Store in Database and Query Database. In case you need the data elsewhere, you may create additional robots (e.g. for Excel files, sending data per email, et cetera).
I want to know the page rank for certain key words against my page. For example I wrote "best movies 2012" my page does come, but in 30th to 50th page. I want to query in the result set Google gave against my keywords so that I can see the rank of my page and my competitors against typical keywords.
I think you may be confusing PageRank with positions. PageRank is an algorithm that Google uses to determine the authority of your site. This doesn't always affect the positions of certain keywords.
There are plenty of good programs and web services around that you can use such as
http://raventools.com/
Most of the good free web services have been closed down due to Google now limiting the amount of searches performed and charging for this data.
You could check out:
http://www.semrush.com
It's free but you have to register to get data.
There are several web services providing this functionality: http://raventools.com/ or http://seomoz.org/
Or, you can perform the task manually. Here is an example on how to query google search using Java: How can you search Google Programmatically Java API
You need to compare your webpage PageRank and website PR against those of the competition. The best indication we have of website PR is the HomePage PagRank.
Ensure that you do this for the appropriate Google domain - USA - Google.com - UK Google.co.uk etc
The technique is described in more detail on http://www.keywordseopro.com
You can repeat the technique for each keyword.
I recently joined a team working on an application that maintains listings with addresses. The user searches, and includes their zipcode, and the application displays the distance to each listing. Currently we use the Google Maps API for this. Reading through questions here on StackOverflow seem to suggest that this is the best way of doing things:
php/mysql zip code proximity search
Search engine by distance
However, while reading through the API documentation, this seems to be expressly forbidden unless we also show a map for each result (and possibly also for each result we filter out, depending on how you read the following statement):
Use of the Distance Matrix API must relate to the display of information on a Google Map; for example, to determine origin-destination pairs that fall within a specific driving time from one another, before requesting and displaying those destinations on a map. Use of the service in an application that doesn't display a Google map is prohibited.
( https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distancematrix/ )
What's the best way to accomplish this without running afoul of any API terms?
do you consider the Geo::PostalCode module (perl)? It uses maxmind database to calculate distances between locations (and there is bind in different languages).
Does anyone know how I could track what search terms people are using to arrive at my site. For instance, someone searchs google for 'giant inflatable house' and clicks through to my site. I want to be able to capture those keywords and which search engine they came from.
You must parse the referer. For exemple a google search query will contains: http://www.google.be/search?q=oostende+taxi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
It's a real life query, yes I'm in Oostebde right now :)
See the query string. You can determine pretty easily what I was looking for.
Not all search engines are seo friendly, must major players are.
How to get the referer ? It depends on the script language you use.
You should use a tool like Google analytics.
Besides the Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools is also very useful. It can report a detail analysis of the search queries' impressions, clicks, CTR, position etc.