Monthly Archives: November 2008

Yahoo BOSS Search “Vertical Lense”

Remember Yahoo’s BOSS Search API? Well, they’re not done with it yet. A new expansion to the service has just launched, though it is currently available only to “certain Yahoo! partners,” with a promise that it will eventually become part of the main BOSS API.

The new service is called “Vertical Lense Technology.” It allows for topical search engines to be created. These search engines, as seen on TechCrunch, the only site to use the service so far, can

  • Index the partner site in real-time. Whenever a post or comment is added, it’s sent to Yahoo to be instantly indexed.
  • Allow ranking tweaks. When you search on TechCrunch, you are shown a carefully adjusted mix of web and Crunch Network results, ordered in a way that hopefully fits their audience.

TechCrunch describes their experiences with Vertical Lense on their website.

Since we publish using WordPress, supplying our data using the first API essentially required that we design and deploy a plugin that would send information to Yahoo’s servers every time there was a new post or comment on any of our blogs. We also needed to create a similar data indexing system for CrunchBase so that contributions there would show up in the results as well. To ensure that all of our archived content was incorporated in the search index, we supplied Yahoo with historical data dumps from all 10 sites. Perhaps needless to say, this took a considerable amount of time just to ensure that the data we indexed at Yahoo was accurate and complete.

You can read more about this on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Now, when can I get one of these? :D

BlogBuzz November 29, 2008

How Secure is Your Domain?

Domain name hijacking has become increasingly prevalent in the last few years. I’ve watched two fairly major domains be stolen out from under their owners’ noses, though they thankfully got them back. Be cautious, and take care that no one walks away with your…

Magpie: A Potentially Bad Way to Monetize Twitter

I had a feeling it wouldn’t be too long until people starting looking for ways to make money off Twitter. Over the past few weeks I’ve watched Magpie spread through the Twitterverse, and seen users’ response to it. They don’t like it. The general…

How To: Integrate Non-WordPress Pages in WordPress

Have you ever put together a cool script or page on your own, and then wanted to integrate it into WordPress so it would have the same look and feel as the rest of your site? Maybe you have a custom survey you put…

PC Magazine to Stop Being Printed

The final edition of PC Magazine, the 25-year-running tech magazine, will be released in January of 2009. The magazine is the originator of comparative software and hardware reviews, and perhaps the first magazine about Personal Computers. While the magazine is going away, the website,…

Full Posts or Excerpts? How About Both?

Should you display full posts on your WordPress blog’s index, or excerpts? Normally I fall into the camp that says you shouldn’t display ten full posts on your main page, since you end up with more duplicate content, and it takes longer to scroll…

Prelovac’s WordPress Optimization Guide

Vladimir Prelovac has an excellent article on optimizing WordPress for speed available now. It covers plenty of bases, such as Caching using WP Super Cache MySQL Caching Checking plugins for slowdowns Optimizing tables If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has…

BlogBuzz November 22, 2008

10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7

Technosailer has a new post up titled 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7. It covers some of the biggest changes coming in the new version of WordPress that’s just around the corner, and gives some good commentary on then. It tells…