GMail serves some really good ads on the column on the right of the email text. Same goes for Facebook. The ads which I see on Facebook are often (very) relevant to what interests me. Obviously they preprocess the information available to them. GMail scans the text of my email, extracts keywords and then serves relevant ads. The same goes for Facebook. They have a lot of user specific information available to them. So I would imagine they preprocess all of it, before generating any ad recommendations.
Does anyone know of what specific algorithms do those systems use?
Facebook, at least, doesn't seem to do any context analysis. Instead, when you buy an ad, you select who will see it based on their location, age, pages... and Facebook will try to show your ad to all those people (ads for a given person are sorted based on how much the advertiser wishes to pay to display it, and only the first few ads are shown).
Try creating an ad, it's extremely interesting (and you can get pretty far before they ask you for your credit card number).
Related
I have an artist who sells his music via google play.
I want to build software that is able to fetch data that consist of number of plays, by gender, age etc.
Is this possible? Currently I have to manually log into the website in order to retrieve the information and automation would work much better for me.
I would be open to paying a fee as well.
Thanks
Such an API isn't offered right now, and to be honest it seems unlikely one will be given this page says "If you would like to make your music available for purchase/download, we recommend one of these YouTube Preferred Partners ...".
It sounds like you'd have to write some website scraping code. There are lots of questions on stackoverflow about libraries for scraping Beautiful Soup is one that is commonly recommended.
I use intuit merchant services - customers pay me with credit card after I send them an email with a link to pay, and everything works with no problem. However, my problem is that the link webpage structure is very outdated and some customers have told me that it doesn't look trustworthy, which I have to agree.
Is there any solution to this, like creating a user interface or a app that I can actually have developed to make this links a little bit more to look like my website so customers don't feel they ever left my website?
Thanks.
You should be careful with this idea. I am not a legal professional and am in no way attempting to give legal advice, but doing what you are suggesting can be illegal in some cases. Some sites disguise their payment screens in a similar way for malicious purposes in a manner called phishing, and there may be little legal differentiation between doing so with good or ill intent.
I don't think this is possible but here is what you actually can do:
Ask your Payment-Website about an API, then you might be able to change the layout.
Inform your customers about the situation and that they will be redirected of whatever you do.
Get a SSL-Cert for your website.
Find another way to receive payments in a trustworthy way
Is there any php API to gather information about a business(address, reviews) by its phone number from Yelp, Google, Insiderpages, Yahoo..
Please help, i have done research about these, but did't get the right info, though yelp is providing info by it's phone number but there they ask ywsid as mendatory (http://api.yelp.com/phone_search?phone=1234567890&ywsid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) but i want by phone number only.
Please note that all APIs have terms, most of them won't allow you to store their data in your own database and most of them have display requirements, before proceeding with any developing please read carefully their display requirements and terms.
Depending on your project you might not be allowed to use the data as you might need/want to on your project.
The other alternative would be scrapping sites, but most sites have rules against scraping too...
And again read a lot before putting too effort on something you are prohibited to in first place.
Yelp
ywsid = API key, you need to get your own key if you are using the yelp API, get it here
if you are using it to add it to your own database or storing the information anywhere it is against their policies display requirements & api terms.
if you are using any API you must read their terms before even thinking of doing anything.
Google Places
API
Insiderpages
I Don't think they have one but you could use the citygrid API that does a [lot of sites] search at once.
Yahoo
Yahoo API
CityGrid
As mentioned before citygrid API
Foursquare
Foursquare API
Merchant Circle
Merchant Circle API
White Pages
White Pages API
Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages API
Bottom line is, all these companies have put a lot of time and effort and money to build their databases, and they want you to redirect people back to their pages so they can make their money back/profit.
I am researching whether the following is possible and if so how I could go about achieving it.
We collect reviews for businesses from their customers and we’d like to post these reviews to Google places as part of the reviews they have on their.
I was wondering how I would go about getting our website to “push” this data to the Google places website, I’ve done lots of searching on the APIs but have found nothing that says it’s possible or not.
Currently the Google Places API does not have write capability. It only has read capability. Right now only ratings are available, but I suspect reviews might come someday too.
Although you can send check-in signals and fix Places through the API. Hopefully Google will add the ability to send reviews and receive them.
If you're looking to get your content added to Google, you may want to talk to their content partnerships teams http://www.google.com/support/mapcontentpartners/
Since Google's local and maps initiatives are under the same people that would be the place to go.
I too looked into this as it would be of huge value to companies if possible.
My research led me to believe that it is not possible and could possibly violate Google's TOA with negative results for the company's Places page.
Instead, I built a workaround that makes it really easy for companies to collect feedback and get their own customers to submit the reviews: http://dallasmarketingservices.com/survey-local-unveiled-how-online-reviews-affect-your-local-business/
Maybe we will see this in the future though.
I employ email validation to grant people full use of the site. The trouble is, sometimes these emails get spam-boxed, or never arrive, so I get many people complaining that they cannot confirm their account.
Was wondering if there are other (creative) ways to offer secondary validation option to users who didnt get the validation. Its a free site, so I dont want to ask for credit cards, or mobile #s.
The purpose of this is to make abuse of the site less rampant, since we ban a lot of people, and they come back with dozens of accounts to prove something. Spam/robot registrations are not an issue (right now).
What we started doing recently was letting members send us an email to a special email address. We give them a hash code, and all they have to do is put that code somewhere in the subject or the body of the email, and send it to us. We have a cron job running in the background that gets those emails, parses the subject/body looking for the hash, and if found activates the account.
It doesn't work 100%, because some ISPs also block their users from sending us emails, but no solution would work 100%.
Based on your comment in Rob S.' answer, it sounds more like you want to identify situations where the same browser is creating multiple accounts rather than confirm that what's at the other end is human.
Dropping a cookie in the user's browser can be very helpful in finding the repeat offenders, especially those not savvy enough to clear their cookies or visit while in private mode. Some forum software like vBulletin does this and can notify the administrators when it happens.
Another alternative might be browser fingerprinting, which is where you use a bunch of the information provided in the HTTP exchange. An example of this is the EFF's Panopticlick.
Just got a "fun" new way to annoy your banned people a bit.
once you ban them (I guess you close the account and ban the IP). Then log their browser agent string with their IP and screen resolution.
If there is a match when showing the website to them. Just remove the registration link/page. Dont even show the link to the page, as it might piss them off. Dont explain why its gone. Just keep it gone, eg. for 3 weeks or 2 month.
That way they dont have a cookie on the browser to remove, they cant find the registration so they cant know WHY they cant make a new account.
Secondly, if on a school or something (dont know how old they are), the other existing users will still be able to login to their accounts as its ONLY registration that has been removed. Not login.
How about that? is that clever enough?
Basically what you're looking to do is separate the humans from the robots. There are two primary ways to do this:
1) Require users signing up to check boxes and type a word spelled out in an image captcha. These are usually very difficult tasks for a computer to complete.
2) Allow users to sign-up using their account from a different site such as OpenID or Google assuming that anyone who has one of these accounts is a real person.
I recommend combining both methodologies.
Good luck!
There are unlimited ways of doing this.
You mention mobiles and free, but if you have access to a SMS-gateway, you can receive SMS-messages for free (but might need to pay some sort of monthly subscription though). But show a dynamically generated code the the current user. Store this code in "his session" and do an ajax check each 15-30 sec to see if the sms-code was received by the gateway. If so, accept the account and let them registrate. This would requiere the gateway + your users to have a personal mobile. Enough about mobiles...
Make a question or more that is randomly generated. Use pictures/tokens instad of tekst so that the user has to press the correct image in correct order to perform some sort of answer.
Could be like a jackpot-machine with 3 cells where the images are randomly placed and generated inside dynamic named files, so that robots cant analyse the names to guess the right answer.
You mention e-mails to be easy to spoof. Yes indeed, but what if the emails would come lets say each week containing some sort of "important info" that the user would need to read/use on the website to continue. Once the account hasnt been used for a certain time (lets say 3 month, kill it)... and you could also say to have a "free account" you must accept that we send you 1 mail pr. month that you need to activate within 1 week. If you dont, we are free to close/delete your account details.
... and many more
I dont know what you want to "protect", but if its for gaming, then dont let the gamers have "extra levels/weapons" until they have provided a certain amount of these codes OR paid for access OR validated by phone or something.
Thats my first 3 ideas, I think the possibilities are unlimited. The main issue here is, make it too hard to validate yourself and the users go away unless your site is REALLY worth it.
You might think of the much used "Free forever (but limited)" approach way of selling stuff these days on the net. The users can make as many accounts they want, but the licens is still only "single/small/basic". Once you get more experienced, you get more features or you might just upgrade by paying... at this time you know WHO is real and WHO isnt.
My point is, dont over protect. Just design with the mind of spammers will always find a way in, no matter how good you protect it. Those giving up first are your real users/customers.
I would rather spend time on making this product/website/game so great that EVERYONE wants to pay for an account after a while.
Lastly from real life... there are COMPANIES in China with kids employeed to play World of Warcraft with one purpose. Harvest virtual gold and sell it on Ebay to other western players who pays with real dollars. Its not allowed according to the gamelicens and their accounts/gameslicenses are constantly getting banned. But it gives them so much income so they have calculated with this and they just buy new licences and continue.
So if EVEN Blizard(WoW creators)
doesnt have enough power/money to keep
fakes out of the game, how do you
expect to do much better? :o)
Usefull answer?