Now i know why they call it a "primary need"

Recently i heard that in a few countries of the world, the access to internet has been declared a primary need.
I believe Finland and Iceland are among the countries and i have no doubt that they are taking the web very seriously.
But as it always happens with us Italians, the so-called primary need could be interpreted in a different way altogether, as we shall see.

So, what is a primary need in the first place?
Water, bread, peace or....?

The right answer can be easily with the help of the instant search of Google, that is the capability of the search engine to supply fresh results while typing.
Yesterday for some reason i was looking for images on www.google.it, so i began typing the letter B and the type ahead feature quickly suggested me some terms (the most frequently sought coming first i guess):
Belen Rodriguez
Belen Rodriguez senza mutande (translation: Belen Rodriguez without pants)
and presumably other less interesting results.
I called a friend of mine and asked to repeat the search using a diffent OS and a different browser and he got the same answer.

Then i typed D and the most sought terms were
Donne senza niente addosso (tr: women without cloths)
Donne senza reggiseno e mutande (tr: women without bra and without pants)
Donne spogliate completamente (tr: completely naked women)
etc.

For C the most sought term was "Cristiano Ronaldo", for L "Lady Gaga" and "Larissa Riquelme", for M "Megan Fox", for N "Nina Senicar", for P "Pokemon" immediately followed by "porcherie sessuali" (tr. wild sex), for S "Shakira", for T "ti amo" (tr. I love you) followed by "tattoo".

Eventually we found some real poets!

For what I've seen these results are fairly unique in the google realm, i tried with google.es, google.fr, google.com.mx, google.is and google.de, but none returned something alike (except "Britney Spears" in Spain), so either the search terms are really different or Google is serving me some generic terms basing on my geographic location.

Well, even without any scientific pretension, it must mean something.

Making Apex Tabs taste good for Google and other search engines

This is not meant to be a tutorial like how to build a successful a website.
I am assuming that you know well the rules, the tips and techniques to make your website appear in the top 10 list of Google, given certain search keywords ;-)

I want to show you instead how to make your Oracle Application Express powered website easy to be navigated by a web spider, one of those programs that drill down your pages in search for linked URLs.

One of the biggest problem with spider navigation in a typical Apex application is in that in order to move from page to page, one has to click on a tab and built-in templates are designed to submit the page whenever a user clicks on a tab and that is achieved by executing a tiny javascript program.

As far as i know web spiders do not execute javascript code, which means that an application basing on tabs for page navigation will not be analyzed beyond the entry page.

This can be a problem if you hope to catch users coming from search engine queries, but it can be a perfectly valid solution if you want to prevent spiders from wasting your bandwidth.

But assuming that you prefer to pull in new users in any possible way, then you must find a workaround to make hidden pages visible.

One technique i adopted in the past was to provide an alternate access path to the pages, in form of a supplementary link list or as URLs within the text or even with links pointing to the desired pages from external sites. Another possibility is to feed Google with a sitemap, but this is a topic i hope to cover in a dedicated white paper that for some reason is buried in my tray and at this time i am still not 100% convinced that Google is indexing a page URL that exists only in a sitemap.
At any rate, all these are perfectly legitimate solutions.

Lately however, for certain applications, i began to change tab sub-templates and turn them into links.
Here is a sample "Non standard tab sub-template" before the change:



and after the change:



To make all this work, the following conditions must be met:

1. All the default pages pointed to by tabs, must have a page alias.
2. Each tab must have the same name as the alias it points to.
   
3. If the application alias substitution string is to be used as in the example above, then the alias must be specified in the application attributes, alternatively the application id substitution string (&APP_ID.) must be used.
   
4. any session items that were set by the page submit, must be passed in the URL. Not all Apex applications may be suitable for this change.
   

As a final note, you can opt for not using session zero, in which case the zero after the colon (in the link URL displayed in the picture) can be replaced by the current session id substitution string (&APP_SESSION.).

Updated Sept. 14.
I realize only now that in the ordered list above i forgot to mention what is now numbered at #2.
Without matching names, it is not possible to build a proper link in the template.

See more articles about Oracle Application Express or download tools and utilities.

When Larry met Larry: Apex, Google and the Web Page Ranking Flying Circus

On one of my PCs i have internet explorer 7 installed along with the Google tool bar.
One of the gadgets provided by this tool is the page ranking meter.
Google is not the only company providing such statistics but certainly it's the most revered.

If i hover with the mouse pointer on this meter while visiting the home page of oraclequirks, i see that Google is reporting a page ranking of 3/10.
Not too bad, but there is room for improvement, i guess.

Funnily enough, the mother of all sites of oracle developers, asktom.oracle.com, an oracle application express application actually, is ranked 0/10.

How can it be?

I mean, there is certainly something wrong going on somewhere, i am getting 1/100 of the daily visits compared to AskTom and probably 1/10 of his wage.
Well or at least so i am told. :-D

Another "andante" says that page ranking is also affected by the importance of the sites linking into yours.
Well, i find very hard to believe that oraclequirks is being linked into by higher ranking sites than asktom does.

Actually there are a couple of complementary reasons explaining this odd situation:

1. Oracle Application Express URLs are not Google friendly.
   
2. Google did not develop a page ranking technology that takes into account the problems inherent to the latest technologies or, better said, they don't like session stuff in URLs.
   

Now, from a developer's perspective this is quite bad, if you are considering page ranking an important success factor for your application.
On the other hand, it's also a good demonstration of how misleading are certain "statistics" about which sites drive the most traffic.

Personally, i tend to ignore #2 in many cases.

I mean, i find so powerful the Oracle Application Express framework that, frankly speaking, let me quote Captain Rhett Butler here, i don't give a damn as to what currently is the web page ranking of my sites.

But there is a but.
Page ranking does play an important role in the order of appearance of hits in a web search.
Given the same content, a higher ranking page will be moved up in the hit list.
And the higher the site is positioned in the returned matches, the more likely is that a user will visit your site.

If the ranking is low because of this "technological gap", then apex developers must be very good at picking the right keywords and arrange them with the rest of the page content, because that is what will let the site emerge from the rubbish, no matter what its page ranking currently is.

So, now you know what to do while waiting for the big event i mentioned in the title of this topic:
when Larry E. met Larry P. (and Sergei B. as well i suppose) and they finally settled this apex web page ranking issue over a pint of beer, a glass of wine, a can of coke or a bottle of still mineral water, that's not the point ;-)

Cheers!

UPDATED 26th of March 2007:

It turns out that Larry E. "won the rush". Oracle Application Express version 3.0 has just been released and it promises to be more Google friendly as it implements a special session handling for public pages exactly as needed.
Thanks for listening Larry! ;-)