Is Google looking at a rough 2015?

Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 10.09.15 AMInteresting read about possibly looming troubles for Google. I will say that in the past I used Google to look for products, but most of the items I found that way were from shaky looking distributors, or links to Amazon, where I found they had a very competitive price.

Perception is reality, my personal perception is that Amazon is a trustworthy enough for me to buy from them. Over the last few months I’ve simply quit Googling for products and checked Amazon first, and only using Google if I felt that Amazon didn’t offer the product or the price was more than I wanted to pay.


Google’s stocks have taken a dive recently. It was a rocky 2014 but the last month has seen a nose dive in stock trading value:
Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 10.12.44 AM

That’s not all. As the Mercury News (headquartered in Silicon Valley) reported last month, FireFox has dropped Google as it’s default search engine:
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26971412/firefox-drops-google-yahoo-default-search-engine

Here is a link to an opinion piece on LinkedIn that discusses this further:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/googles-very-rough-transition-nicholas

Playing with Code — hacking a CraigsList Parser

Intro:

While watching the sky fall here on the California Coast, I decided to hack together a fun little toy for scouring some of the local Craigs List sites for things; such as Track Bikes. 🙂

The Concept:

  • Collect regions of interest list for Craigs List.
  • Execute search in each region using AJAX’ed page grabs.
  • Display parsed results in a list on the final page.

The Execution:

Using a multi-dimetional array of States, with sub-regions, hostnames were collected recorded. It looks something like this:

/*  Craigs List Stores */
$CLStores = array(
	'California' => array(
		'San Francisco' => 'http://sfbay.craigslist.org',
		'Chico' => 'http://chico.craigslist.org',
		'Sacramento' => 'http://sacramento.craigslist.org',
...
		),
	'Nevada' => array(
		'Reno' => 'http://reno.craigslist.org',
		'Elko' => 'http://elko.craigslist.org',
...
		),
...

This list is iterated upon, with each entry being passed to and AJAX worker bot. When the bot completed the page grab and parsing, the data is returned to the main document, and dynamically inserted.

foreach($CLStores as $state => $center){
        printf('
  • %s
    • ',$state); ... printf('
    • %s
      Loading...
    • ',$url,$state,$name,$id); ...

    This is all pretty basic stuff, but automation of searches is a specialty of mine, and it’s kept me gainfully employed with many contracts over the last 15 years.

    THE LINK:

    Here is THE TRACK BIKE SEARCH LINK

    Final results look like this:
    Screen Shot 2014-12-12 at 7.57.16 AM