RSS feeds

I am testing a new feature for g-metrics.com, "custom rss feeds". After you have logged in, you will notice at the bottom of "my list" page a link for your custom RSS feed. If you try it, please leave a comment here to let me know what did/did not work...

g-metrics is getting attention!

It looks like more and more people visit g-metrics.com and mention it in their pages! That's great, I like the feeling that other appreciate my work so far and I feel motivated to make g-metrics.com even better!

Some websites mentioning g-metrics:
- Google Blogoscoped
- forret.com/blog
- Capt. Cornelius Contents Weblog
- addict3d.org

Some people ask me how to use PHP to access the Google Web APIs. Well, a good starting point is http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2003_06_22_index.html

I'm already designing the new g-metrics engine that will be much more efficient and will have many more features, but I have so much work to finish before summer vacations....

UPDATE: (more websites)
- www.hakank.org/webblogg/

- www.e.kth.se/~strang/blog/

Data loss

Unfortunately, yesterday (Sat 17 Jul) the data gathering scripts did not run, due to a syntax error... A day's data lost...

:-(

Links of interest (google-related)

Lately I've been searching around for interesting google-related pages, and I've come up with this list:

• Google Hacks
• Google Alert
• Google API roundup :: hebig.org
• O'Reilly Network: Google Web API
• persistent.info: RSS-based PageRank™ Monitoring Tool
• Poodle Predictor (this is fun..)
• SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching: Google Archives
• Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power
• TouchGraph GoogleBrowser

Hope you find them interesting.

Cool feature!

Registered users can "link directly" to their g-metrics list like this:



Any other ideas?

g-metrics.com has google AdSence ads now.

These guys are so right. I mean, they are a company, and they have to make sure they protect their interests, but they're cool, and open to ideas!

Here is the e-mail I received from "The Google Team":

Hi Panayotis,

Thank you for the detailed information you passed along. Google grants you
a limited right to use the Google Web APIs service for commercial
purposes.

Your use is still governed by the rest of the Terms and Conditions at
http://www.google.com/apis/api_terms.html. This includes, but is not
limited to, the fact that you may not use the search results provided by
the Google Web APIs to create a product or service that competes with
those offered by Google. Please also note that this service is still in
beta and may be taken down for maintenance purposes or discontinued at any
time. While Google is providing the Google Web APIs service to you free of
charge, we reserve the right to charge for this service at any time in the
future.

Best of luck with your project. If you find that you need additional
queries in future, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team

The bots are here...

In actually no time (just 3 days after the site is on-air), search engine spiders arrived. A couple of observations:

Yahoo!
The client string is set to Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp). The IPs used where in the following subnets: 66.196.90.*, 66.196.91.* and 66.196.101.* Yahoo! robot(s) performed 68 requests today, and always looked for robots.txt.

Google
Googlebot (identified by Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)) performed only 4 requests today and 2 yestarday, from the following IPs: 64.68.82.136, 64.68.82.37, 64.68.82.172. It will be interesting to see how much time will pass until I can see results when searching google...

Data transfer from old DB + observations

I transfered the data I have collected over the last couple of months (rgarding keywords like "linux", "windows" etc.).

An interesting observation is that "something happened" at google on Jul 10! All googlecounts had a "negative spike" on that date.

g-metrics.com goes live!

Well, after some development an initial version of g-metrics.com is on-line!

What it basically does is to keep track of the "googlecount" of various terms. If you register, you can add your terms too in the database, and watch their googlecount as it changes from day to day.

The "google query" string can be anything (I think) you would use in the google search box. So, one could keep track of the number of links to a page (by using "link:www.domain.com/page"), in addition to a "normal" search...

There is much to be done, much to improve, but ... well.. it works!

Waiting for google...

I am in the middle of an interesting idea on how to use the Google WEB APIs. It's not anything ground-breaking, but I think many will like it.

The problem is that the application I have in mind may need (depending on how many people use it) to perform a lot of queries to google trough their WEB API. I contacted them (google) but they need to see exactly what my site will look like... I guess I'll have to wait a couple of days...