The AnalystBeing different is a gift, like being normal

Google displays brief live cricket scores when you search for a cricket matchFiled Under: Mr Analyst

Google has been displaying live scores with it’s search results when a visitor queries for live scores or a particular match (I haven’t been free to write about that though), (Bing has that future too)

Just type in the word “cricket“, here is the snapshot of what I found just as I’m writing this post

Live scores followed by news results in cricket

Specific site search in Google, yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Seznam…Filed Under: Mr Analyst

Using site specific search operator in Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Bing, Seznam

To restrict your search for a specific website (let’s say to search for Helen Hunt from wikipedia website) in Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Bing,Soso, Sogou and Seznam you need to use site: operator
For example the search for site:wikipedia.org helen hunt
will return pages from all wikipedia sites for the key phrase Helen Hunt (BTW she is my favorite), take a look at the snapshot

Google has returned top ten pages from wikipedia sites for “Helen Hunt”, You can also notice in the snapshot that there are pages from en.wikipedia.org pages as well as from simple.wikipedia.org, you can restrict search to a specific sub domain by exactly typing in the url after site operator as in “site:en.wikipedia.org helen hunt“. Even better refining of results is possible by restricting search to a specific folder of the site Eg:en.wikipedia.org/wiki helen hunt

You can also use site: operator in broader sense, instead of just limiting search to a specific site, we can restrict site to .edu, .org, .com and other top level domains Eg: site:edu mit

Seznam is different and good in someway, It returns results of the forms example.com/cs/page/1/ and example.com/page/1/cs/ when you search for site:example.com/cs/

Yahoo redirects us to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com when site: operator is used, we can directly go to siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and type in the site url instead of site operator.

Yandex doesn’t support site operator as I know, It only returns the main page as of now, but if you are a webmaster and wondering how to know which of the pages are added to yandex try adding your site to Yandex webmaster tools at webmaster.yandex.ru and search inside your webmaster tools (http://webmaster.yandex.ru/site/indexed-pages.xml?host=xxxxx&path=*) by just typing in the sitename followed by * Eg: example.com/* will return all example.com pages
Note: XXXXX in the url is the id of your site that yandex has assigned (only if have submitted your site to yandex)

How to save an image to your ftp account from an url using phpFiled Under: Mr Analyst

1. $file_location= ‘http://example.com/image.jpg’; // http address of the image file
2. $img = imagecreatefromjpeg($file_location); // you have to use a different command if you are saving a different format image, use imagecreatefrompng or imagecreatefromgif accordingly
3. $width=800; $height=600;
4. $temp = imagecreatetruecolor( $width, $height );
5. $destination_location=’/location/where/you/want/the/file/to/be/stored/image.jpg’;
6. $quality=80; // quality you wish to retain from the original image, 70% to 80% is good both qualitywise and quantitywise. Trust me it saves a lot of space from the original image
7. imagejpeg($temp,$destination_location,$quality);

this is pretty much it, I was using it in one my applications and when

I had to write this, I just copied the lines that are useful to this post, though I haven’t checked this, you can expect them to work for you right away, please let me know if it doesn’t work byleaving a comment, I’ll try to test it myself

How to save a file to your ftp account from an url (remote) with phpFiled Under: Mr Analyst

This method works for most of the files, I only say most because I haven’t tried all. I have tried SWF flash and images, as I know it works well for both txt/ html files. I guess it will be okay even with pdf or some other file format, please leave a comment if it works for the format you have ben trying.

Access a file with php through it’s url and then write it into your ftp

$from_url=‘http://example.com/sample-file.swf’;
$location_to_write=‘/home/username/mysite.com/test.swf’;
$file_content=file_get_contents($from_url);
file_put_contents($location_to_write,$file_content);

Note:

1. Use complete ftp address for the destination file name
2. /home/username/mysite.com is just the way my host stores files, different hosts have different ways, your’s might use www/blah/public_html kind of navigation

Please leave a comment if it works for other formats or if it doesn’t work at all, that would help others too

List of Top 10 search engines based on their popularity and trafficFiled Under: Mr Analyst

Top ten search engines based on their alexa ranks are:-

Note:

1. Numbers to the right indicate Alexa ranks and in the brackets the Primary language of  that particular search engine is mentioned.
2. Other sites like AOL, Myspace, Altavista, Alexa are excluded as they use results from the above listed search engines.
3. Though Sohu is a popular site it uses results from sogou hence ranked together.

List of top social bookmarking sites based on their popularity and trafficFiled Under: Mr Analyst

Note:
1.Yahoo buzz, techmeme are excluded
2. Pages are arranged according to Google PR and Alexa rank