I am creating a web site with 2-stage authentication where users will have to verify a particular image on the screen (similar to how many banks and CC companies are currently doing this).
Where can I find a large source of images (not icons) that are about 120x120 (or larger) for use in this? Ideally, Id like to find a few hundred of these images and they do not have to be free.
You could search for Creative-Commons photos available for commercial use on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=nature&l=comm&ss=0&ct=0&mt=all&w=all&adv=1
I've used freedigitalphotos.net in the past to get some pretty good images -- you can get the small ones (about 640x480) for free.
Well, there's Google's image search, the options let you specify the exact dimensions you're after, and they'll search most stock-photo/art sites, too.
iStockPhoto sells stock photography, you can just buy the lower rez stuff.
Related
I've gotten a message that my site may be knocked off of Google Merchant Center due to "Inaccurate availability (due to inconsistent availability between the landing page and checkout pages on your website)".
This affects only a small amount of products (only around 0.3% of my 40,000-ish products), so I know it's not an engine issue. After asking Google to recheck the results, they came back with the same error, but with a completely different list of products with no overlap, so I know it's not a problem on the individual product level.
There's no geo-locking on these products, and Google says that the problem exists on US IPs.
Nearly all of the errors look like this:
Value on the landing page - v:out_of_stock
Value in the data feed - v:in_stock
Performing an audit on the products in question shows that none of them have been out of stock for weeks, so the data feed is correct.
None of Google's suggested common issues (geolocking, buy button not working, product can't be shipped to an address, products not available country-wide) seem to apply. The country Google checked this on was a US-based IP.
I'm running out of ideas here, does anyone have any other suggestions?
The answer turned out to be something silly for my site, but I'm posting the answer here just in case this helps someone else.
Google's crawler was setting their country to be Andorra and attempting to check out using the US site. This is obviously not a good representation of the US experience. Google advised us that this was a mistake on their crawler's part, and that we would pass the next audit without any modifications. So if you're here looking for a solution, the absolute best advice I can give you is to find a phone number for Google Merchant Center and give them a call because the error may not be on your end at all.
Update: We passed the audit with no changes made on our part.
I used to use google finance to create portfolios/change them and then display them on my site but since its being removed I'm wondering if there's any good free alternatives?
Basically I have a program that creates different portfolios based on different factors(20 right now), so each of the 20 links on my site direct people to a page that displays the portfolios. I am looking for something that I can use to automatically update the portfolios.
If it helps, my site is basically a free tutorial site that helps people learn how to manage their own portfolios. There's different lessons and then using market data & news(which I already get) I automatically generate a sample portfolio to show them how everything comes together. I liked google finance because they could see all of google's data but they could also click around and dig deeper if they want.
Is there anything I can use to get this result?
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you want, but it sounds like #DirkEddelbuettel's BeanCounter will do what you need.
Or, if you're just looking for quotes see http://www.gummy-stuff.org/Yahoo-data.htm and http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
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.
I want to maintain a database of all the products or the brands with respect to industry.
For example I need to get information about all the food supplements. How can I get them?
I am not sure all the companies have an API for their products.
Please advise
Uhm,... what kind of information? If you need prices, you can probably get information from goverment sources. At least you can here in Argentina. Other than that, I don't think it's possible, unless you somehow manage to scrape websites of all the brands you want to track.
Speaking as someone who has worked for two data-aggregation companies, aggregating data involves a lot of manual work. You find the sources, you automate the acquisition of data as best you can (APIs, file downloads and imports, even screen scraping from HTML pages), and you stay on top of it constantly. You're always looking for additional sources, updating code for sources that have changed, minding legal implications of sources who don't want you to harvest their data, etc.
Sometimes you have to buy the data, or weigh that cost against not having data from that source or scraping it manually. Sometimes a source will block you in some way and you need to either try to get around that or negotiate some terms with them. It's a viable business model, but it's not cheap.
For some products, Retailigence ( http://www.retailigence.com ) may have data in API form. They basically keep track of local stores' inventory and pricing for certain categories of products.
You should definitely check out Good Guide - an API that gives you access to details on over 60,000 household products.
http://developer.goodguide.com
DailyMed is a good service to check out if you're interested in products in the medical space.
http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed
I know Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") are mainly come from META description. However, when one of my web pages shows up, there are some undesired words like price (which is not good at all). What I want it to show is just the description of the product rather than its price. Actually the price only mentioned twice in the whole page.
How could this happen? And how can I remedy it?
Including the price in the snippet is actually very desirable for most people. If your price is higher than the competition's for the same products they probably don't want to buy from you and check out other results instead.
To make sure the search engines don't see the price (and thus don't display it in the results) you should use JavaScript. I think even Amazon does this to prevent screen scraping in some cases. It should be easy, especially with something like jQuery.
$('#priceForProduct987A').html("$125")
You should be able to control the snippet displayed by google through the use of the meta tags:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
However the results displayed by Google in this case might be different if someone is trying to do some searching on a product. Google will then think you're shopping for that product and try to display the price of it. This might be the case for you.