Wednesday, October 27, 2010

As the functionality of the web is increasing, so does the opportunities and methods of making money online. Everything is going commercial at the internet. Marketers seem to have become more creative than ever in promoting there product. One of the marketers would come with the idea of selling background space at twitter where another with buying signature space at the forum where a member has hundreds or may be thousands of posts.
This is a win-win situation for all. Makerketer who are not good content writers have a chance to market there products without being good at writing or without hiring a copywriter. Those who are members of forums may make money by selling signature space to the marketers which will appear at the bottom of each of there posts. Forum owners will enjoy more members as people see a way of making some bucks as they contribute to the forum.
I saw a few forums where people were selling there signature space. That bring the idea in my mind of providing the sellers and buyers a plateform which will be convenient to both of them. Sellers will be able to signup as the publishers and buyers could easily seek them and choose the top-poster of the forum of there relevant niche. Moreover, the chance of getting scamed will be minimum.
That idea being in my mind I searched the web to find out relevant meterial.

The guy there came up with the same idea!
Adspace seller script is off the market but might be brought back.
Traffic redirector script: Not really relevant but might help.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Question-Answers Search Engine

  With the growing popularity of Yahoo! Answers more and more simalar websites are comming to the compete the niche. Yahoo! Answers not only provide newbies a facility to seek the experts' advice about a certain problem but it is a good way of marketing also. As I said earlier, there are now many simalar websites around but Yahoo! Answers and answers.com are leading ones. Both these websites provide RSS Feeds which can be used to make a kind of unique websites. This is what I have in my mind as I am writing this post. With the help of Feeds these websites offer we are going to make a question-answers search engine!
This will be an easy way to get regularly updated content and we can make money with Adsense. The search engines will also love our website as it will update regularly. So lets the ball rolling!
First, we need to write the code which will fetch results from answers.com. Note that I am not going to make a complete script for the search engine, instead I will only code the important part of our website such as how to fetch feed from Yahoo! and answers.com. At the end of the post you will find a list of recommended facilities which you can integrate to enhance the question-answers search engine.

  PHP code to fetch results from answers.com:

<?php
  $request = "http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Special:RSS&words=" . $_GET['keyword'] . "&answered=true";
  $response = file_get_contents($request);
  $xml = simplexml_load_string($response);
  echo "<h1>{$xml->channel->title}</h1>";
  foreach($xml->channel->item AS $qaItem)
  {
    echo "<a href=\"$qaItem->link\" title=\"\">$qaItem->title</a><br>";
    echo "<p>$qaItem->description</p><br><br>";
  }
?>

  The first line in the above code will fetch results from answers.com. As we have used the parameter answered=true it will only yeild questions which have been answered. Since we are making a search engine where people can find information about there problems and not a plateform where they can post there queries, using the answered=true parameter makes sense.
OK, now for Yahoo! answers results just replace the first line of code with http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=$_GET[keyword]&tab=1 so that:

   $request = "http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=" . $_GET['keyword'] . "&tab=1";

  While searching on internet i found another similar website offer RSS Feeds. The website is called ChaCha.

  $request = "http://www.chacha.com/search/feed.rss2?query=" . $_GET['keyword'];
 

  TODO:

  Write proper script for the search engine.
  Add rencently searched Tags for Search Engine Optimization.
  Add Paging for more than 10 results.
  cashe results for searches.

  Reference:

  http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_can_you_turn_WikiAnswers_content_into_RSS_feeds_to_be_used_elsewhere_on_the_web
  http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/yahoo-answers-rss-api
  http://developer.chacha.com