Archive for August, 2006

If you've taken the time to make changes to your site over the past month, it's important to monitor their effects. Here are my top three tips to ensure you make the most of measuring your results and gain a deeper understanding of what's happening with AdSense on your site.

1. Get accustomed to custom channels.

The single most effective way I've found for publishers to measure their results is by using custom channels. Custom channels are the ideal way to determine how a recent change in ad placement or ad format has resulted in improved performance. Many publishers fail to keep their custom channel list up to date each time they make a change -- or even worse, don't take the time to set them up at all. Not knowing if you've made the right decision for your site's visitors will make it even more difficult to take the next step, so use custom channels like a tracking device to ensure you're on the road to success.

2. Be analytical in your approach -- use Google Analytics.

Monitoring your AdSense performance need not be restricted to the features within your AdSense account. Learning about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your website will help you make informed decisions regarding ad placement and formats. As we mentioned last week, Google Analytics can help you make choices about improving your site design while incorporating the Adsense optimisation tips into your new layout. Measuring the results of such changes enables better decisions for your site's users, so why not measure your site performance with Analytics?

3. Make yourself available, your reports are now emailable.

If you're serious about measuring how your account is performing, you'll need to keep up to date with your reports. Why spend time trawling through data in your account when you can get it all sent directly to your inbox? Emailable reports are a recent addition to your AdSense account, which give you exactly the data you're interested in on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. What's more, you can send them to multiple email addresses. This way, you can keep your business partner up to date on recent successes. Emailable reports are easy to set up and even easier to access, with one click in your inbox. If you're not using this option already, I encourage you to to set up emailable reports today to monitor the effects of your changes straight away.

Posted by Robert Freeborn – AdSense UK Optimization Team

Starting a few minutes ago, all of our Yahoo! Answers APIs began accepting a new output type, RSS. The API Explorer has also been updated; it will now output XML, JSON, RSS, and PHP. If you don't feel like building an app, or you're just getting started, you can use your RSS reader to subscribe to a search just as if you were on the Answers page itself.

Post by Luc Vincent, Uber Tech Lead

We wanted to let you all know that a few months ago we quietly released - or actually re-released - an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine into open source. You might wonder why Google is interested in OCR? In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing.

This particular OCR engine, called Tesseract, was in fact not originally developed at Google! It was developed at Hewlett Packard Laboratories between 1985 and 1995. In 1995 it was one of the top 3 performers at the OCR accuracy contest organized by University of Nevada in Las Vegas. However, shortly thereafter, HP decided to get out of the OCR business and Tesseract has been collecting dust in an HP warehouse ever since. Fortunately some of our esteemed HP colleagues realized a year or two ago that rather than sit on this engine, it would be better for the world if they brought it back to life by open sourcing it, with the help of the Information Science Research Institute at UNLV. UNLV was happy to oblige, but they in turn asked for our help in fixing a few bugs that had crept in since 1995 (ever heard of bit rot?)... We tracked down the most obvious ones and decided a couple of months ago that Tesseract OCR was stable enough to be re-released as open source.

A few things to know about Tesseract OCR: for now it only supports the English language, and does not include a page layout analysis module (yet), so it will perform poorly on multi-column material. It also doesn't do well on grayscale and color documents, and it's not nearly as accurate as some of the best commercial OCR packages out there. Yet, as far as we know, despite its shortcomings, Tesseract is far more accurate than any other Open Source OCR package out there. If you know of one that is more accurate, please do tell us!

We are grateful to all the people at HP who made it possible to release Tesseract into open source, and especially John Burns, who championed and babysat the project. We would also like to thank the original Tesseract development team, a partial list of whom is here. Last but not least, many thanks to our friends at UNLV's ISRI, including Tom Nartker, Kazem Taghva, Julie Borsack and Steve Lumos, for all their help with this project.

By the way, we are also hiring top-notch OCR engineers! See this job posting for more information.

For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters.

Well the time has come here at Ask.com and we've started to roll-out some what we hope are useful and practical examples.

We now offer a growing list of emoticons (aka smileys) that can be found by simply typing the smiley into the search box. Look for the definition in a Smart Answer box at the top of web results page.

Examples include:

:-) - Find this emoticon's meaning

:-/ - Find this emoticon's meaning

:D - Find this emoticon's meaning

Of course, each Smart Answer also includes links straight to a dictionary for more emoticons and other net terms. We even offer a link to learn more about IM ettiqutte.

By the way, we also offer a non-alphanumeric result for a popular weblog/news site.

In addition to smileys, we're building a set of Smart Answers for instant messaging shorthand like
brb, lol and rotfl.

Again, we just don't give you the definition but also links to sites where you can learn more.

We plan on doing more with non-alphanumeric searching in the future.

All of this is about Smart Answers saving users time and effort in getting to the information they need.

Enjoy!

The Ask.com Smart Answer Team

Posting to the Blogger Atom API (e.g. via a third-party website or desktop client) is not working properly. We are investigating.

Update, 11:24AM: This has been fixed.