Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

It wasn’t my intention, when I wrote about how Google wouldn’t index one of my sites to make it to the #1 keyword for “Google Sucks” but it happened anyway. That’s a story for another day–right now my gripe is with infamous search engine Yahoo, which doesn’t index any of my sites at all!

Try searching for name, Elliott Back on Yahoo and you get absolutely nothing:

I tried adding my feed to Yahoo Site Explorer but it’s been 50 minutes and it hasn’t been indexed yet. I’m going to contact Webmaster Support and see what comes. My suspicion is that this is a side-effect from the rapid adoption by others of WP Autoblog, which links back to me, one of the reasons I stopped distributing it.

Update: I submitted my feed at 05/17/2007 14:18:01 and it was processed on 05/17/2007 14:26:18. Apparently it took a long time to get reported as processed, but the processing itself happened within 10 minutes.

Update 2: Well so far nothing. If any Yahoo people stop by, drop me a note or give me a call and we can get this sorted out.

Update 3: I emailed a friendly Yahoo employee who might be able to help, and also signed up for their paid search inclusion, “search submit basic,” which hopefully can nudge the site back into the index. Although, I don’t feel right paying for being indexed, it feels too black hat.

Update 4: I got the following email back from Yahoo:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Search.

It has been determined that your site may not comply with Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines located at: help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

Below are some answers to common questions regarding this issue:

Q: What are some of the common reasons that a site may violate Yahoo!’s Content Policy Guidelines?

A: Yahoo!’s Content Quality Guidelines (link above) outline what we are and are not looking for in pages that we index. Listed below are some of the more common reasons that a site may violate these guidelines:

- Cloaking (showing crawlers deceptive content about a site)
- Massive domain interlinking- Use of affiliate programs without the addition of substantial unique content
- Use of reciprocal link programs (aka “link farms”)
- Hidden text
- Excessive keyword repetition

Q: If my site has a judgment against it, can I use the SiteMatch inclusion program?

A: All pages submitted to SiteMatch are editorially reviewed. If a site has a judgment against it, it is likely to be rejected by the SiteMatch program.

Q: If my site has a judgment against it, can I use the Yahoo! Express directory inclusion program?

A: Yes, the Yahoo! Directory and Yahoo! Search Index are different systems. Inclusion or exclusion from one does not affect the other.

Q: How can I have my site re-reviewed?

A: Please review our content quality guidelines to make sure that your site meets all of them. When you feel the site is ready, please complete the form located at: add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview requesting a re-review of your site. You may wish to include an explanation of unique features on your site, or details of changes to your site’s content that may assist our editors in their evaluation.

Please allow several weeks for the review process, YST indexing, and a complete refresh of the database before checking search.yahoo.com to see if your site is listed in the Yahoo!Search Index. We do not offer specifics detailing how an individual site is not in compliance with our guidelines, but we will review your site individually. You will not be
receiving further notification regarding your request for a second review, and we are not able to offer the option of another review.

Thank you for taking the time to make the Yahoo! Search Index better.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,
Evan

Yahoo! Customer Care
www.yahoo.com/

Uh, this email contains no information that could help me understand why I’m banned from Yahoo, or how to correct that ban. Thanks for the … wasted bits in cyberspace!

There are a couple bits of interesting YPN/Yahoo related news recently. The first is that Yahoo’s new product, MyBlogLog, happens to do Adsense tracking. This means that if you use MyBlogLog, Yahoo could be learning proprietary information about your Adsense to use to improve their competing YPN product:

Coincidentally, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) is also tracking information on Google AdSense — how many clicks Google AdSense ads are receiving (on webpages that have both MyBlogLog and AdSense installed), the ad unit size, and what webpage those clicks occurred. Yahoo doesn’t know the CPC for each of Google’s ads, but they do know the click-through rate (CTR) — and can specifically target high CTR publishers first, with their YPN offering.

Then in the “we made a huge bug” department, Yahoo charged their $1000 bill 50 times to a guy’s credit card, which would definitely suck for him:

Yahoo! experienced a technical issue that caused the credit cards of a few advertisers to be charged incorrectly on Wednesday, February 14. Some credit cards were authorized for one or more charges in error.

We caught this early and were able to halt the process before the charges were actually completed. We’re very sorry for any issues this might have caused you and we’re doing everything possible to completely resolve the situation as quickly as possible, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

So, the transition to their new Advertising platform Panama is probably not going as smoothly as they’d like, with much internal patching and scurrying, but over the next few months these kind of events will probably fade away. Bugs are to be expected with change, as are accusations of “under the table” business practices.

In a much better naming than Technorati’s immature WTF (Where’s the fire), Yahoo today released a labs product called Yahoo Pipes. The name comes from linux file handle terminology:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

The idea is quite simple. Yahoo Pipes lets users take everyday RSS feeds and mash them together with Yahoo APIs, other feeds, and programmatic building blocks in an easy to use graphical environment. Unfortunately, the execution is terrible and buggy. Take, for example, this yahoo pipe I created to scan the NYT feed for locations / keywords and insert flickr images as appropriate:

The first thing you might notice is that it doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to. Well, we’ll come to that in a minute. You’ll also notice a lot of & going around–every time I hit save it re-encoded the original ampersand. How irritating. Worse is how their pipes are so watered down they can’t do anything:

All I wanted to do was take some content, for each item do content analysis and geo analysis, and use those outputs as the input to a flickr search, then append the photo to the text snippet. Well, first you can’t fork a data stream into two bits and recombine them later. So scratch two kinds of analysis. Second, the outputs of content/geo analysis can’t be used to populate the inputs of the flickr data source–an obvious problem. And third, the annotation feature useless doesn’t annotate, it just replaces chunks messily.

Yahoo, your pipes are indeed clogged.

You’ve probably seen the article at at 24 ways about Ajax in-place editing, but honestly the javascript they code up there seems quite hacky and un-standards-compliant. Instead, we’re going to use the Yahoo UI Library (YUI, YUI-EXT), a modern cross-browser javascript toolkit, to accomplish the same results with less hassle, and more power.

The effect we want is like Flickr’s edit in place descriptions:

Part 1: The YUI javascript example:

In javascript, here’s the code. First you need some includes:

<script type="text/javascript" src=js/yahoo.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=js/connection.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=js/event.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=js/utilities.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=js/dom.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=js/yui-ext.js"></script>

Don’t forget to add this handy shortcut–we’ll use it later:

<script type="text/javascript">
var $ = YAHOO.util.Dom.get
</script>

Then we need a function to show something as editable:

function showAsEditable(e){
	YAHOO.util.Event.preventDefault(e);
	YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation(e);

	if(this.oldBG == undefined) {
		var pos = this;

		while(pos && pos.style.backgroundColor == '') {
			pos = pos.parentNode;
		}

		this.oldBG = pos.style.backgroundColor;
	}

	var anim = new YAHOO.util.ColorAnim (
		this,
        	{backgroundColor:{to:'#ffffd3'}},
		.5,
		YAHOO.util.Easing.easeOut
	);

	anim.animate();
}

This function finds the closest defined background color, if not already defined, and saves it. Then it animates to a nice yellow overlay color. Now we need its reverse:

function showAsNotEditable(e){
	YAHOO.util.Event.preventDefault(e);
	YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation(e);

	var anim = new YAHOO.util.ColorAnim (
		this,
		{backgroundColor:{to:this.oldBG}},
		.5,
		YAHOO.util.Easing.easeOut
	);

        anim.animate();
}

This function is even simpler–it just restores the saved background color. Now that we can turn their “editable effect” on and off, we need something to actually do the work:

function editHandler(e){
	YAHOO.util.Event.preventDefault(e);
	YAHOO.util.Event.stopPropagation(e);
	var target = (e.srcElement) ? e.srcElement : e.target;

	var form = '<div id="' + target.id + '_editor">';
	form = form + '<textarea id="' + target.id +
		'_edit" name="' + target.id +
		'" rows="4" cols="60">' +
		target.innerHTML + '</textarea>';
	form = form + '<br/><input id="' + target.id +
		'_save" type="button" ' +
		'value="SAVE" /> OR <input id="' +
		target.id + '_cancel" type="button" ' +
		value="CANCEL" /></div>';
	form = form + '</div>';

	YAHOO.ext.DomHelper.insertHtml('afterEnd', target, form);

	YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(target.id + '_save', 'click', function(){
		YAHOO.util.Connect.asyncRequest('POST', 'ajax.php',
		{
			success: function(o){
	                	target.innerHTML = $(target.id + '_edit').value;
	                  	$(target.id + '_editor').parentNode.
					removeChild($(target.id + '_editor'));
				target.style.display = 'block';
			},
			failure: function(o){
				$(target.id + '_editor').value =
				'Sorry, the update failed...';
			},
			scope: this
		},
		'action=updatepost&target=' + target.id + '&value='
			+ escape($(target.id + '_edit').value)
		);
	});

	YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(target.id + '_cancel', 'click', function()
	{
		$(target.id + '_editor').parentNode.
			removeChild($(target.id + '_editor'));
		target.style.display = 'block';
	});

	target.style.display = 'none';
}

Now that that’s out of the way, you just need to add these handlers to mouseover, mouseout, and click events of “editable” items:

var elements = YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsByClassName('editable');
YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(elements, 'click', editHandler);
YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(elements, 'mouseover', showAsEditable);
YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(elements, 'mouseout', showAsNotEditable);
YAHOO.ext.EventManager.onDocumentReady(Init.init, Init, true);

Part 2: the HTML code

Here’s an example of some html code that automatically makes itself editable:

<div class="itemcontent">
	<p id="description-' . $row['id'] .
		'" class="editable">' .
			htmlentities($row['description']) .
		'</p>
</div>

Part 3: the AJAX

Since we encode the field name and identifier in the id attribute of the editable element, processing the ajax request is easy:

$value = urldecode($_POST['value']);
$bits = preg_split('[-]', $_POST['target'], -1);
$field = $bits[0];
$id = $bits[1];

switch($field) {
	case 'title':
		$object->UpdatePostTitle($id, $value);
		break;
	case 'description':
		$object->UpdatePostDescription($id, $value);
		break;
}

Conclusion

Using YUI you can add a robust, cross-platform edit-in-place solution that’s as easy as giving your html elements id attributes in the form “$field-$id” and the classname “editable.” The rest is magic. For a live demo, see my edit in place demo.

As 2006 comes to a close, a number of major search providers have released their top search queries. Even though the results may be heavily doctored, they’re still valuable insights into the PPC industry.

Yahoo: Britney Spears, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, American Idol, Beyonce Knowles, Chris Brown, Pamela Anderson, Lindsay Lohan

Google: bebo , myspace, world cup, metacafe, radioblog, wikipedia, video, rebelde, mininova, wiki

Lycos: Poker, MySpace, RuneScape, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Pokemon, WWE, Golf, Spyware, Britney Spears

MSN Live: Ronaldinho, Shakira, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Harry Potter, Eminem, Pamela Anderson, Hilary Duff, Rebelde, Angelina Jolie

AOL: Weather, Dictionary, Dogs, American Idol, Maps, Cars, Games, Tattoo, Horoscopes, Lyrics

You can view the Top 10 Searches of 2006 spreadsheet on Google Docs, if you’d like. The data came from the following sources: Yahoo, Google, Lycos, MSN, and AOL.

Initial observation shows that searches are primarily dominated by celebrity terms, and that AOL’s searches are corrupted by their “AOL Keyword” search system. Google’s are likewise corrupted by what I suspect is manual filtering to produce tailored techie terms. Yahoo, MSN Live, and Lycos share 50% of their terms with others’ top terms, while Google and AOL come in last at 20% and 10% respectively, an indication of poor search quality.