TW Blog :: Entries for SEO

Google Search History

Also relates to Firefox and Co

A little behind the competition, Google has just rolled out My Search History Beta which saves your search beahviour and provides quick access to previous searches using a clustered interface. Chris Sherman discusses My Search History in detail over at Search Engine Watch. If like me your requests from the Firefox searchbar are redirected to your locality (eg google.co.uk), the magic variable seems to be lr. So the following src file (in the searchplugins directory of your Firefox installation directory) will ensure all searches go through the MSH application:

<search 
  name="Google History"
  description="Google Search with History Enabled"
  method="GET"
  action="http://www.google.com/search"
  queryEncoding="utf-8"
  queryCharset="utf-8"
>

<input name="q" user>
<input name="hl" value="en">
<input name="lr" value="">
<input name="btnG" value="Search">

</search>

I look forward to seeing how well the clustering engine works as my search results grow…

Posted on Apr 21, 2005 at 11:29:22. [Comments for Google Search History- 1]

Google Implements XMLHTTPRequest

Also relates to DOM Scripting

Live data retrieval has found its way onto Google in the guise of Google Suggest. As well as returning suggestions for the search term as it is entered, each suggestion is accompanied by the number of results, making this quite a useful tool in the initial stage of SEO.

On the client side the concept is really just a reworking of Bitflux's Live Search, although a quick look under the hood at the somewhat obfuscated javascript source shows the Google developers have given preference to the MSXML library instead using XMLHTTPRequest as the fall back when the initial try/catch blocks fail. Of course, Google utilises its immense power on the server side to return results from its 8 billion strong database, based on popularity, in a split second.

Posted on Dec 11, 2004 at 14:44:54. [Comments for Google Implements XMLHTTPRequest- 3]