Technology Tips

A good practice for websites is to include a site search functionality on the� site, so� your visitors can locate the information they are looking for� quickly.� But how� to set this up?� And how can I� keep the search results on my site so that the visitors don’t leave?� � In this post, I will discuss� how to set up a site search using Google Custom Search Engine, with the result pages� hosted� on your own domain.� � The two key steps are 1) create your custom search engine, and 2)� place the code in your website.

Create Custom Search Engine

First login to your Google account, then go to your Google Coop page. Click on the My Search Engines link under the Create your own search engine header, and click on the New Search Engine link. You’ll see the following screen.

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Here is the browser market share for August 2007, based on traffic to my top site:

IE: 65.66%
Firefox: 30.99%
Opera: 1.83%
Safari: 0.70%
Mozilla: 0.57%

In August, IE continued its comeback, moving up 0.26% during the month. Firefox decreased by 0.14% during the same month. The smaller browsers all saw small losses: Opera lost 0.04%, Safari lost 0.03%, and Mozilla lost 0.03%. Looking forward to September, schools will be back in session, and we will see if that makes a difference to the browser market share.

Here is the browser market share for June 2007, based on traffic to my top site:

IE: 65.40%
Firefox: 31.13%
Opera: 1.87%
Safari: 0.73%
Mozilla: 0.60%

For the second month in a row, IE gained market share (+0.28%) while Firefox lost market share (-0.20%). Among the smaller players, Safari’s market share remained constant, an indication that the “Safari for Windows” product is not gaining much traction. I downloaded Safari for Windows when it first came out, but haven’t used it at all since the initial 2-3 days.

I just came upon the Adsense format below:

Three text links appeared below the regular ad unit. If you mouse over the text link, I find the link to be in the format of ‘javascript:gurl(’XXXXXX…XXX’)’. I used Google Blogsearch to see if anyone has noticed this type of display, and didn’t find any mention. Wondering if Google is testing a new Adsense for Content format that combines an ad unit with a link unit?

A couple of nights ago, my computer got afflicted with the WinAntiVirus malware.

It started out innocently enough: I was using Windows Media Center to watch TV, and I had IE open pointing to a portal site. As the TV program was about to end, I heard a couple of beeps. I didn’t think much of it at the time (actually by that time it was probably already too late). After the program ended, I closed Windows Media Center, and started noticing that the computer was really busy. A couple of minutes after that, I start seeing the following:

• Popup windows, popup windows, and more popup windows.
• A program called WinAntiVirus asking to see if it can install itself.
• The computer remained extremely busy.

At this time, it was obvious that I got hit by the WinAntiVirus malware (isn’t it annoying that it disguises itself as a anti-virus software?) My first job was to figure out what I can do to get rid of it. So, I went to the search engine and found a couple of sites, all of them recommending elaborate steps for removing this trouble maker.

“There must be an easier way!” I thought… I am always leery about downloading more software and going into the registry, and then I remembered Windows XP has this System Restore function that would restore the system configuration to a previous time. So, I tried this route. Lo and behold, it worked!

In addition to that, I went into the Temp folder and got rid of all the files that were created after the system first became unstable. Hopefully these steps have saved my computer from this dreaded malware.

One thing that makes me wonder is how the malware got into my computer in the first place. I was not viewing any dubious web pages, and I haven’t opened any strange email attachments. Obviously figuring out what had happened is important because I want to be able to plug that hole so that this doesn’t happen in the future. A search on the internet, however, didn’t reveal anything. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know!

We often hear about someone making such and such amount of money from one particular form of advertising, or from one particular web site. This is all great. However, assuming that publisher does not have another income stream (whether it be a different website or a different method of income), that publisher does run the risk of having that single site / single monetization mechanism taken away from him/her. What if someone outranks you in search engines and you lose half of your traffic? What if the program you have been relying on all of a sudden decide to cancel your account? Or simply disappeared? Do you have a way to react to these types of events?

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Blogging With Desi Baba is Sunny M’s personal blog, mostly focused on technology and blogging. He started blogging in July 2006, and he posts frequently, about once a day.

My first impression of the site is favorable: Font is big enough, search box is easy to find, etc. He writes about a variety of topics, and his writing is often humorous and easy to read.

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If you love using Twitter, you might be surprised to hear this: Your messages could be indexed by the search engines.

If you want to find out whether any of your messages are in Google’s index or Yahoo’s index, type the following in the query box:

[username] site:twitter.com

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