Posted: January 26, 2010 at 7:12 pm |
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Google announced a big change in how to handle the search results via adding synonyms for words that can be used in search. This should affect the position of web pages in Google’s search results.
It is important that Google can deal with synonyms.
Google wants to show the best results for search. Because of that, it is vital that Google’s algorithm get to know the words which are used in the search. The best way to understand these words is to check the synonyms of them.
What are synonyms: They are words that have the same meaning, for example “pictures” and “photos”. People searching for “sunset pictures” are probably also interested in web pages that contain the words “sunset photos”. A problem is that words that can have different meanings. For example, the word “case” can mean “occurrence”, “instance” or “example”. It can also mean “box” or “container”. The word “guitar box” might be a synonym for “guitar case” but “O.J. Simpson box” is not a synonym for “O.J. Simpson case”. Google’s measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.
The Changes Google made
Google’s official blog posted that they have improved the way that they detect synonyms. For example, the algorithm can now find 20 possible meanings of the search term “GM”.
GM can mean General Motors, George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm], etc.
Google also made a change to how the synonyms are displayed. The searched words and the synonyms are now displayed in bold in the search results. Web pages that contain only synonyms of the searched word can also be displayed in the search results.
Posted: January 19, 2010 at 8:26 pm |
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Google Search Engine started to show real-time results side by side to the regular search result pages. These real-time results are meant to show web searchers an access to new and instant news items as fast as it happen.
The main components of Google’s real-time results are twitter tweets. These are the real-time micro-blog messages that Twitter users use to post news and activites. Google’s Amit Singhal, who led the development of Google’s real-time search, recently showed how Google ranks these tweets in the new real-time resultson Google search pages.
There’s some kind of Page Rank only for these twitter tweets.
Google’s Page Rank algorithm for standard pages is to looks at the link structure of a webpage. The more links to a website and the more links to the linking websites show more relevant the linked website is.
But tweets from twitter are not about links but its about followers. People “follow” the comments or tweets of other Twitter users. The more followers a Twitter user has, again the more reputable the tweets are for that user. If Twitter users who have many followers follow another Twitter user then these users can have a bigger impact to the reputation of that user.
“It is more than a popularity contest”, said Google’s Amit Singhal. “One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation. As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”
There are other filters and algorithms that rules this as the follower reputation rank is only one factor of Google’s methods to rank these tweets, other factors like hash tags, spam and the signal in the noise are some others.
- Hash tags: Twitter users use “hash tags” in twitter comments. Hash tags are symbols (like keywords) that start with a # followed by a popular topic, as an example of hash tag #earthquake. If this hash tag is included in a tweet, this tweet will start to show up in the real-time results when other Twitter users click that hash tag’s topic word elsewhere on the site.
- Spam: Hash tags can be very useful to maximize the exposure of a tweet, but sometimes they are abused for spamming. The wrong hash tags can become a red flag that triggers Google’s search spam filters. Amit Singhal didn’t go into the details in this but he said that Google modeled the hash tagging behavior in ways to reduce the exposure of spam or low-quality tweets.
- The signal in the noise: There can be thousands of tweets that has a very welknown word like “Obama”. To find the best relevant tweets, Google searches for “signals in the noise”. Such signal can be a huge number of tweets that mention other words relative to “Obama”, for example “Cambridge police”. These kind of tweets with these kind of signals will be chosen for the real-time results.
Posted: January 17, 2010 at 8:04 pm |
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Our team at VEXXHOST has released a new utility that automatically installs all the applications required to encode videos on your server (FFMPEG, MPlayer, MEncoder, etc.)
It’s very simple and utility, all you have to do is just execute it and it’ll take care of everything afterwards.
Feel free to post on the forums or here if you have any questions, comments or any problems you see!
Also, of course, you can just sign up for hosting with us and we can help you setup everything here 
Check it out: ffmpeg installer
Posted: January 13, 2010 at 7:44 pm |
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As a PHP developer since the introduction of PHP3, I always insisted on creating my scripts from scratch. I believed that starting from an empty text file was the best, fastest and most lightweight solution. This was what I have been doing for the past years until I read up more about PHP frameworks.
I was extremely skeptic about frameworks, I told myself that PHP is way too advanced already and a framework is simply overkill, that if I needed anything, I would code it myself and take care of it. I ran into CodeIgniter and I was very impressed by their “Blog in 20 minutes” video (which in all honesty can be done in 5 or 10 minutes if the video maker did not go into details). Also, it is open source and accessible to everyone.
We have recently introduced a new dedicated server configuration utility when making orders for our clients (check it out, follow this link and click on “configure server” for any other listed servers: xeon dedicated servers). We had to take care of this and obviously have it up as soon as possible. I had reviewed and checked CodeIgniter so I decided to give it a shot for this project.
Deliver much faster results
The results were incredible, the entire utility was done in less than 2 days which seems incredible for the amount of code that would have been required if I did not have a framework, there are numerous places where a lot of time was saved because of CodeIgniter.
Built in form verification was a great time saver; CodeIgniter makes it extremely easy to take care of validating web forms by using a library, verifying the input of the user is as simple as writing the following:
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| $this->form_validation->set_rules('username', 'Username', 'required');
$this->form_validation->set_rules('password', 'Password', 'required');
$this->form_validation->set_rules('passconf', 'Password Confirmation', 'required');
$this->form_validation->set_rules('email', 'Email', 'required');
if ($this->form_validation->run() == FALSE)
{
$this->load->view('myform');
}
else
{
$this->load->view('formsuccess');
} |
More about this is explained on CodeIgniter’s documentation regarding Form Validation. There are tons of different ways and libraries/classes that permit you to get more done in much less time.
Easily create expandable and modular PHP code
CodeIgniter is based on the common concept of “MVC” code, MVC stands for model-view-controller, the three aspects or modules of the application or script that you’re developing. Each aspect focuses on taking care of something specific, the views is basically what the client sees (you could possible call it template), but it’s basically what the client sees, the “controller” is the back-end where everything is executed and everything is programmed there, the models are basically common functions or classes that you’re using
While I tried my best explaining it, the best way to understand MVC coding is by actually giving it a shot and also referring to CodeIgniter documentation regarding the model-view-controller software approach.
Give it a shot.
The amount of time saved has made us switch over from our own code to running everything through the framework; it simply makes everything so much organized and makes modifications a swift. The amount of time saved plus the impressive software approach leaves your program to be extremely modular and easily expanded.
Thanks for reading everyone and hope you enjoyed the post
Resident VEXXHOST programmer,
Dave
Posted: January 6, 2010 at 10:21 am |
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Starting December 2009, Google search engine started to show real-time results on its search engine result pages.
The real-time result box is displayed for search keywords and phrases that are currently in discussion on popular social network websites. For Google to provide these real-time results, they started many partnerships with websites like MySpace, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Twitter.
Google hasn’t showed how these real-time results are chosen but it looks like some things that seem to have some sort of effect. So if you want your tweets to be shown in Google’s real-time results, you should consider doing this:
- Google seems to create profiles for users who re-tweeted much more than other users. And if that Twitter user has so many high-authority followers, then it’s more likely that these tweets will show in the real-time results.
- Google seems that they want to identify spammers by the quality of their followers and the quality of their tweets.
- Google also seems that they are now analyzing the text that is used in the blog post, tweet, etc. to rate the quality of the post or tweet. If a post quality is low and it looks like spam, then it won’t be chosen to show in the real-time results.
All the collected data will be used to decide an “Update Rank” for each contributing user in social networks and whose post will be shown on Google.
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