Bart G. Dev...: Tag Google

Google advanced features

Bart — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:09:29 -0600

By now I'm sure lots of people know about the cool little and big tools that Google provides. Google Scholar is a great way to look up publications, Google Book is becoming an efficient way to browse libraries, not the internet (the internet is virtual library, yes, I see that relation), and there's many utilities you can quickly get information on.

Ever want to know what the population of Canada is? type in:

  population canada

A quick calculator:

 5 + 3 = 8
 sqrt(-3) = = 1.73205081 i
 28 fahrenheit in celsius = = -2.22222222 degrees Celsius

Custom domain search:

  site:bartgdev.com rails

So these are cool utilities, but there's also a ton of advanced features you can use to perform your searches right in the search bar as well. For scripting these features become powerful tools, such as daterange. I found it today while researching something.

Google lets you restrict your search to specific time frames. So to check out my site's existence, changes, and references can be tracked nicely through this feature:

  bartgdev daterange:2454101-2454131

has a few results, and:

 bartgdev

has the whole picture, telling you how long (not that long apparently) my site has been up.

Very neat utility I think.

Google Street View

Bart — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 01:25:00 -0500

Google has finally come out with Street View.

Yes, in addition to seeing and interacting with your maps, viewing a satellite image of your car in your driveway, flying through the air around our little plane on Google Earth, and marking the geography of your places and adventures, you can now check out the street of some cities in the US.

Looks like New York, San Francisco, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas are the chosen ones.

I'll be in San Francisco next week on a street which presumably looks like this:

Some people are concerned, and anything Lewis Black has to say, is worth listening to.

I'm sure it's not the first attempt at something like this, but it's a big undertaking, and Google has pulled it off quiet nicely.

Googled description of your Typo blog not your own? Check your theme.

Bart — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 01:04:00 -0500

Google your Typo powered site and check the description under your page's title in the google results. You might find that the text is actually coming from your theme's pages. The theme determines what the final HTML will look like, this includes any data search bots see. For example, if a site is googled with Leevi Graham's Oragami Typo theme (this happens with any theme, not just this one. I happened to like it), the following description showes up:

"So what are all these buttons for? BartGDev.com..., has many personalition features for you, the reader…"

Well that’s not right. I need something that would introduce my site to anyone scanning the googol to googolplex of results. So here’s what I did.

Choose a unique word from this text to find the file where this is coming from. You can do this by running the following grep command from your /typo directory:

[/typo]$grep –R personalition *

I got a match on 3 files:

  themes/origami/layouts/.svn/text-base/default.rhtml.svn-base:
  themes/origami/layouts/default.rhtml:  
  tmp/cache/META/DATA/ACTION_PARAM/"your_blog_name"/articles/index/.cache:

The first is obviously a subversion entry, due to the .svn references. The second is the actual source of our ‘google text’. The 3rd is part of the cache. I’ll get back to it in a minute. Back up the 2nd matched file (default.rhtml), and with your favorite editor, like pico, edit it. Add this line just after the <title>...</title> tags:

<meta name="Description" content="this text will show up on as a description in a search engine's preview of your site" />

My description was showing the first 160 characters, so something that’s equal or longer than that should be enough. Note that this text will not show up on your site.

After saving, you’ll want to go to your site and check the page source the browser gets (Ctrl-U in Firefox). You might notice that the change didn’t take. Bolucks!!.. Rubish!!!.. Pisha!!!... you scream. Well I say “Uno Momento”. You’re looking at the cached version of this file. This is the 3rd file you found with the grep command. You’ll need to delete it before you see your newly edited page. So go ahead and delete ONLY the .cache file, not directory ( tmp/cache/META/DATA/ACTION_PARAM/"your_blog_name"/articles/index/.cache:). Now refresh your site and check the page source. That’s it. Next time googlebot checks your site, you should have the new description. Enjoy nice Google Results!

Bart