HN user

landyman

114 karma

I do programming, SEO, Analytics and lots of stuff, mainly for a private company. you can e-mail me: landyman [at] gmail[dot]com http://hackernewsers.com/users/landyman.html

Posts4
Comments32
View on HN

I'm pretty sure Excel can do all of this. I think if all of the data has already been ported to Excel, it would be much easier to figure out how to make Excel do what you want than to port the data to something else and learning something else.

In this example, you could filter the data by name, sort the results by the date, and highlight all duplicate addresses using conditional formatting.

If you really don't want to use Excel, you could load the csv in almost any programming language; read in the records, find the duplicates and spit the resulting records back out into whatever format you want.

Antitrust+? 15 years ago

I agree that it seems valid. I also think that Google would most definitely use that data if they had it. Google used to show live twitter results in their SERPs; but stopped when Twitter took that data away if I remember correctly.

I work with ellyagg and I can confirm that he did in fact gain 25 lbs in a month using GOMAD, CrossFit and some additional strength work at the gym.

In the same time, I lost about 23 lbs with a diet of few carbs and no processed food, and doing the same exercise routine. I've kept it off even after going back to more normal diet. But, I plan on doing it again since I've still got some weight to lose.

Google Search NoAPI 15 years ago

Yes, which is what we thought too. But, you can setup a "custom search engine" with some default site (we used www.google.com), then change the settings to that it uses the entire web, and remove the site that you originally put in.

The Bing and Yahoo APIs are definitely a lot better, IMO. But, as long as Google wants me to use their Custom Search API, then that's what I'll use.

Google Search NoAPI 15 years ago

Google has told me (and other users of the now deprecated AJAX Search API) to switch to their paid Custom Search API.

The new API is missing some features that were in the old API, which is unfortunate. And, also unfortunate, the most accurate Google results (Local, Web, Image, etc.) come from scraping in ways like this article describes. Hopefully, Google will address these issues in its Custom Search API. If they don't many people will still continue to scrape.

Title Junk 16 years ago

In my experience, Titles do matter. Titles matter not only as a main "ranking factor", but also because the Title is most often the link from the search engine result to the webpage. Having keywords in there means that those keywords will be highlighted/bolded in the result, making them stand out -- I don't know if that actually makes people click on links more often, but I wouldn't bet against it.

Also, using Apple as an example from the article, Apple's Title is Apple because people don't get to the Apple site by searching for "mp3 player". People go to Apple's site because they want an Apple product. Apple doesn't need to try and rank for all that other stuff; it's not what they do and they don't need it. Branding is different than ranking.

You can try reddit -- not the main reddit, but a technical subreddit will usually get you some constructive feedback. For example, if I wrote an app in Python, I could post to the python subreddit to get some better feedback than any of the other ones. You'll have to weed out some of the trolls, but it's still worth the time.

I have also seen some good feedback come from posting a link on Twitter. Usually just the people I know will actually try it out, so the feedback is honest and straightforward.

I also love Fantasy Football. We play in a rookie keeper league where you can carry over rookie players that you draft into the next year. Looking into those rookies does take some time, partly because these are people you get to keep for the long haul, but it's before the football season, and we can easily do it while we're not at work. A lot of the "overanalyzers" don't win anyway.

It is a good way to get into a friendly competition with your friends and get into football. We do some office leagues and games every year because it's competitive and fun, and we don't find a huge hit to productivity. Most people do it on their own time at home.

My favorite words for stumping everybody are: lynx and eczema. I thought for sure that 'lynx' would get on that list since there is only a "sometimes" vowel and an 'x' in there.

Other services I've seen that seem to not fall into that "smaller players" category: Coremetrics, Webtrends, Unica, OneStat, and Clicky. I've worked with all of these (and some smaller players too), and I must say that for the value, you really can't beat Google Analytics. Even Omniture will have some times when the data is not available right away; especially as you start doing some more complex things with it.

It is there because Google outlined it in a Patent: http://bit.ly/akczok -- see [0099]

I honestly think that they do not really use this signal though, and if they do, it's so far down in their algorithm that most searches will never use it. I've had domains that are only registered for 1 year that rank just fine.

It depends on the site and the terms people are searching for. Inbound Links can make a site rank highly for some searches, even when the entire page content is Flash and has no other content on it. But, to rank for all the terms you want, having Flash content only will not work.

I've used Ubuntu for about 3 years, and use Firefox/Firebug, Emacs plus the emacs-goodies package. While emacs is a bit long to learn, I find that it's incredibly efficient. I also use Apache, nginx, Python/Django, PHP, and MySql to do local testing.

Every now and then I try some different envrironments, and last week was one of those times. So far, I've liked gedit a lot and may switch to it eventually -- it has some nice plugins: colors/syntax highlighting, integrated shell, autocomplete, etc. It's fast and a bit easier to use at first than emacs.

I liked NetBeans, but I couldn't get any of the plugins to work, so I ditched it. I'm retrying Eclipse since the last time I tried it, it started to be painfully slow. I also will try PyCharm as soon as I can get it to build.

I know a couple of doctors who have said that people come in saying "I have X, I need Y".. they called it "Googleitis". There are some times when they are right, but many times that they are wrong.

I agree that the tests should still be performed to take care of that problem. I also strongly agree that "requiring referrals" and having to go to 3 or 4 different doctors to get a test, diagnosis, prescription, and often times, another test just to make sure is terrible. Each time, I need to schedule appointments, wait, go to another doctor, wait, etc. It seems like what should take a week to do is stretched out in to 6-8 weeks, and I have to pay for it every time, even with Insurance.

At work: Windows 7, at home: Ubuntu 10.04

At both places: 2 monitors, Emacs (js2-mode, python-mode, php-mode, charp-mode, yasnippet, a custom theme, and more), a terminal shell (sometimes inside of emacs) and a browser open.

When I did systems programming (just for curiosity), I used just a shell and emacs on CentOS, Slackware and FreeBSD; along with some good books on messing around with that stuff. The OSes were run inside of virtual box just in case I really messed something up :-)

Even though I couldn't find out if they do in the Webmaster Tools Report; the Page Speed Analyzer (Firefox Add-on from Google) does take it into account (as does YSlow, another Speed Testing Add-on from Yahoo). I would think that Google would take it into account because checking if something is cachable is easy; and I don't think Google is stupid enough to not check that.

Agreed. Your customers may not know what they want, but the feature comparison chart doesn't solve that for them. Having your new product be a huge feature superset of all of your competitors doesn't get you anything. It may give your product all of those features, but it will probably give your product all those weaknesses too plus an extra complexity that most customers won't want.

The factors they use to determine the health rankings are interesting. I particularly like "Liquor Store Density."