Tag Archives: cricket

Some new additions to Google Search Syntax

Google has added some new search syntax and so here is the update to my Google Search syntax tutorial.

Fetch only Fresh results

First one is to narrow down your search to only the most recent web pages. This is particularly important, since Google has started serving fresh results.

Alex Chitu from the unofficial Google Operating system blog has found that we can use as_qdr query parameter to search only for fresh pages.

In order to use this you have to add a new parameter as_qdr at the end of the url like below
http://www.google.com/search?q=ipod&as_qdr=d

The as_qdr parameter can take the following possible values.

  • d[number] – past number of days (e.g.: d5)
  • w[number] – past number of weeks (e.g: w5)
  • y[number] – past number of years (e.g: y5)

More explanations by Matt Cutts and also at Life hacker.

Cricket

Being born in India, circket is there in my blood and the same for Sadeesh Duraisamy who works in Google. Thanks to him and now we can keep an eye on the latest circket scores by just typing the word cricket in Google’s search box.

Well, it’s time for me to watch the do-or-die match with South Africa for India in the latest twenty20 tournament. 🙂

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Why no AJAX?

I was viewing the score for the cricket match between India and England from Yahoo! India Cricket portal. The problem being a web programmer is that you always tend to look at each web page from the development perspective and something grabbed my attention. The web page was refreshing every 60 seconds to get the latest score and a new request/response is generated every time. (Ok so have you got what I was thinking about?) Why are they not using AJAX to refresh the scores rather than refreshing the whole page every time?

The web developer inside me got out and I immediately checked the other sites which are also offering the cricket scores. I checked Sify and Rediff. Even they are not using AJAX and are refreshing the whole page every time. But the refreshing interval was different. Here is the refreshing interval which I got by looking at their META tag.

Rediff 480 seconds
Yahoo India 60 seconds
Sify 60 seconds

The obvious advantage in using the AJAX approach (XMLHTTP) is that the amount of data that is going to get transferred from the server is going to be less and it’s going to save the bandwidth by leaps and bounds.

I would be really happy if any one from either Sify or Rediff or Yahoo! India reads this and just gives a thought about it. And do any of you guys know how to get the raw data about the scores and the license requirement (if available). I am thinking of giving it a try and build a POC (Proof of Concept) app, if the data is available.

Oops!, by the time I could compose this post, the match has been stopped due to rain 🙁

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments