First let me say I know what I'm asking for is not the kind of think Analog does. But I'm asking here because I think lots of Analog users would want such a tool, so maybe someone is already using what I want and can recommend it.
I am looking for a tool that will monitor the placement of my web pages in the search results at several search engines over a period of time. The way I imagine this would work is that I could type up a file full of search query words and phrases, and another file with some URL's or domain names of the pages I want to monitor. Then once a week or so I would submit the search queries to a number of the search engines and get back a log file showing where any of my pages placed in the ranking. If I repeated this once a week or so I could make a graph of a page's progress in advancing or retreating in the ranking for a particular search query. One can get search queries to use by using analog's SEARCHQUERY report after a site has been online for a while. One could also type in keywords that one simply hopes a surfer will be able to use to find one's pages. If you got to http://freshmeat.net/ and enter "google" in the search box, you will find a few libraries that will parse the output of some search engines, mainly google. That's really the hard part, so I know I could write a tool like this myself if there wasn't one available already. You can do this either by scraping the HTML output from any search engine, which I imagine is difficult and error prone but can be gotten to work. Google also offers an internet protocol that one can use to query it programmatically; this would be much more reliable and easier than scraping but of course would only work for google. There is a limit to the number of queries one can submit on any day without paying for it, but I think the limit is high enough that it wouldn't impact this kind of thing. It would be great if there were an open source tool but a reasonably priced proprietary tool would be OK too. It can run on any operating system but Linux would be most convenient to me. Thanks, Mike -- Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow. +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this | mailing list, go to | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | List archives are available at | http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/archives/ | http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.7 +------------------------------------------------------------------------
