Capture and display Google Site Search results on branded page

Hello,

I'm using the Google Site Search Widget on my website, but I'd like to
capture the results of a user's search, and return them on a page
branded like the rest of my site, instead of directing my users to a
google page filled with links.

Does anyone know if this is even possible? I'd much rather use google
than another site search utility.

Your Help appreciated!
Jen

"starlightjen" <jen (AT) jeneration (DOT) com> wrote:

Hello,

I'm using the Google Site Search Widget on my website, but I'd like to
capture the results of a user's search, and return them on a page
branded like the rest of my site, instead of directing my users to a
google page filled with links.

Does anyone know if this is even possible? I'd much rather use google
than another site search utility.

Possible yes. Violation of Google's TOS: certainly (unless you pay them of
course).

--
John Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Get a SEO report of your site for just 100 USD:
http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html

starlightjen wrote:

Hello,

I'm using the Google Site Search Widget on my website, but I'd like to
capture the results of a user's search, and return them on a page
branded like the rest of my site, instead of directing my users to a
google page filled with links.

Does anyone know if this is even possible? I'd much rather use google
than another site search utility.

Your Help appreciated!
Jen

With Google, there is a limited amount of customisation (including a logo
with size limitations) that you can apply to search results pages. I have
pretty much pushed that to the limits, so if you are curious, go to my page
(below) and run a search in the little widget at the top. You can define
colours, logos and some bits of the layout. Google won't permit anything
beyond that.

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com

On Sat, 16 Jul 2005 18:56:06 +0200, Davémon <nospam (AT) nowhere (DOT) no> wrote:

I've used PHP and Googles API to do exactly that. Providing it's for
personal, non-commercial use, and you don't expect to do more than 1000
searches in a 24 hour period (otherwise it locks you out) then it works
fine.

In my experience you can be blocked much earlier, if you try to use Google
in rapid sequence. Luckily blockade is removed in a few hours.

Best,
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com - chemical calculators for labs and education
BATE - program for pH calculations
CASC - Concentration and Solution Calculator
pH lectures - guide to hand pH calculation with examples

Darren Tipton wrote:

Hi Guys,

Been reading this group now for quite a while, and been attempting (where
I have time) to put into practice the things I've learned.

I am not sure we are people to /learn from/. Search engines are enigmatic
and all we do is speculate and judge based on the patents proliferated by
Google et al.

My site has been up about a year, sits at PR3 and gets around 50,000 PR's
a month. Is that reasonable? Should I be getting a lot more? Could I get
alot more?

Get you give me some of these 50,000 PR's? I can distribute them across
5,000 sites to give them PR10. Did you mean "visits"? If 50,000 is the
number of visits, you ought to get a higher PageRank. You definitely can,
too.

I've tried to get IBL's with some success, but google doesn't seem to pick
them up, it's update cycle is rather long compared to the likes of MSN,
Yahoo.

It does not necessarily /list/ all links, but it probably follows them,
which leads to higher traffic and plenty of indexing. Google usually crawls
the most among the search giants.

Anyway, address is in sig, any ideas as to what I could do to improve
things? Advice appreciated.

Thanks
Darren

The same old tricks and tips probably apply. They could not fit within a
single message, so finding relevant Web pages and tutorials would be a good
starting point.

Hope it helps,

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com

On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 11:43:19 GMT, Darren Tipton <news (AT) appletippy (DOT) org>
wrote:

Get you give me some of these 50,000 PR's? I can distribute them across
5,000 sites to give them PR10. Did you mean "visits"? If 50,000 is the
number of visits, you ought to get a higher PageRank. You definitely can,
too.

50,000 Page Requests a month. I've noticed alot of my traffic is generated
from fairly random search terms actually. My main keywords do show up in
google, but on about page 10.

Page Requests (which I guess means hits) is not very helpful since it
lists everything that's been requested. So if you have a page filled
with 50 spacer images 1 request for that web page could equate to over
50 hits.

A site of mine received the following stats for June-

301,366 visits (this is the number of visitors that month)
3,474,344 hits (number of pages, images etc... requested)

This site is very low on images, so there aren't many pages where the
hits rack up, so each visitor resulted in 10 hits.

If we assume yours is the same your 50,000 hits equates to about 5,000
visitors a month or 160-170 visitors a day. If your site has a lot of
images (including spacer images) it could be a lot lower than the
above.

If this is what you get you can do far better than this, but not with
a PR3 home page, though you are doing better than one of the SEO's on
this NG who only gets 40 visitors a day with a PR4 home page, so could
be worse. I've found PR5 is really where the traffic starts to roll
in, easy to get when you know how.

I also noticed a potential problem with your site-

http://www.google.com/search?num=100...2F&btnG=Search

None of your pages have a Google cache. This sometimes means a sites
been penalized. Though it could also be due to the low PR, didn't
check further.

David
--
Free Search Engine Optimization Tutorial
http://www.seo-gold.com/tutorial/

On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 14:35:18 GMT, Darren Tipton <news (AT) appletippy (DOT) org>
wrote:

Hi David

On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:38:37 GMT, David
seodave (AT) search-engine-optimizat...es (DOT) co.uk> wrote on the topic of
"Re: Increasing PageRank and Traffic?":

Page Requests (which I guess means hits) is not very helpful since it
lists everything that's been requested. So if you have a page filled
with 50 spacer images 1 request for that web page could equate to over
50 hits.

I do actually mean page requests (i.e. individual HTML or PHP pages
downloaded as a single file). I see hits as an almost meaningless figure for
exactly the reasons you state below as they include a hit to every file that
each page calls.

A site of mine received the following stats for June-

301,366 visits (this is the number of visitors that month)
3,474,344 hits (number of pages, images etc... requested)

This site is very low on images, so there aren't many pages where the
hits rack up, so each visitor resulted in 10 hits.

I was always of the view that a "visit" was difficult to define as it was
also dependent on unique users from different IP addresses within a given
timescale. Hence why I use page requests, it's the only figure that seems to
be reliable ? At least this is what I used when I managed
http://www.iam.org.uk

If I use the referrer logs to calculate unique, new visitors. By that I
mean, I work out how many people came in that didn't know the URL already,
such as links from elsewhere. Search engine searches, etc. etc. If they knew
the URL already, then they had it bookmarked, or there was no referrer cos
they had already typed it in. i.e. not a "new" visitor. Then it's around 700
visits per day.

I also noticed a potential problem with your site-

http://www.google.com/search?num=100...2F&btnG=Search

None of your pages have a Google cache. This sometimes means a sites
been penalized. Though it could also be due to the low PR, didn't
check further.

hmm ok, could it be because the content changes alot?

No. Mine change a lot too but I'm cached. A cache is a specific
snapshot taken at a specific time, it won't not be there just because
it isn't representative of the current page.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk/ seo (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
seo that watches the river flow...
--

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 10:52:37 +0200, Davémon <nospam (AT) nowhere (DOT) no> wrote:

In my experience you can be blocked much earlier, if you try to use
Google in rapid sequence. Luckily blockade is removed in a few hours.

Thats suprising, i've had no blocking due to multiple rapid sequences
(ie. though looping requests or what have you). Feel free to test/break
http://www.nightsoil.co.uk/pop/

What's Google's error message for that?

I don't remember exactly - 403 and something about automated (not allowed)
queries or some virus that hijacked my system and is generating such
queries.

All I have left is this php code (it is supposed to properly handle this
situation, no idea if it does, as I don't recall seeing 403 answer in
my output):

$gurl = "http://$google/ie?q=$googleq&start=$i&num=$num";
$handle=fopen($gurl,"r");
if ($handle)
{
$HREFfound = '';
while (!feof($handle))
$HREFfound .= fread($handle, 8192);
fclose($handle);
if (strstr($HREFfound,'403') && strstr($HREFfound,'Forbidden body'))
{
print("<tr><td>403 - Google refuses to answer</td></tr>\n");
return;
}

$googleq, $i and $num are defined earlier.

Best,
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com - chemical calculators for labs and education
BATE - program for pH calculations
CASC - Concentration and Solution Calculator
pH lectures - guide to hand pH calculation with examples

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 09:52:37 +0100, Davémon <nospam (AT) nowhere (DOT) no> wrote:

In my experience you can be blocked much earlier, if you try to use Google
in rapid sequence. Luckily blockade is removed in a few hours.

Thats suprising, i've had no blocking due to multiple rapid sequences
(ie. though looping requests or what have you). Feel free to test/break
http://www.nightsoil.co.uk/pop/

What's Google's error message for that?

I get blocked when I use IBP for 20 minutes or so to get rankings
results. If I want to use Google afterwards I access it through FF
otherwise it refuses me.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk/ seo (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
seo that watches the river flow...
--

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005 11:57:07 +0200, Davémon <nospam (AT) nowhere (DOT) no> wrote:

It looks like you're querying Google directly though a http request
(rather than the SOAP based API) which they might not like.

Exactly. But even using API you are limited and to do the full check
of your all keywords throughout all datacenters you can easily reach
the limit.

But then without knowing what $google and $googleq is set to I can't be
sure!

$google references datacenter (like "66.102.11.104")
$googleq is just a question (like "ph+calculation")

Problem is, I am paying at home for transfer (I am overpaying, but I have
no other choice at the moment). My idea was to put some script on my hosted
server - traffic there is much cheaper and I am far from the moment I will
be forced to pay above my monthly fee.

Additionally I wanted to be able to check all search results and to do it
without errors. Most SEO tools returns only the first hit, which is
sometimes
not enough. Mcdar returns first occurence of domain string - which is not
necesarilly hit for my site (as for today I think search for "chemical
calculator"
and www.chembuddy.com doesn't return hits from my site).

But I have never finished it. I was not able to overcome timeout problems -
my script needs some time to collect data and analyze them. When it checks
one or two datacenters, it works. When I want to check five or six DCs
script
times out. Perhaps I can ask for some configuration changes at hosting
company,
but finishing these scripts was never a task with priority high enough

Best,
Borek
--
http://www.chembuddy.com - chemical calculators for labs and education
BATE - program for pH calculations
CASC - Concentration and Solution Calculator
pH lectures - guide to hand pH calculation with examples