Andrea Olivato’s Blog

I got really interested by last days news about the possibility to refine google searches specifying a date, and I made use of this new powerful instrument both for work and personal queries, looking for latest comments on press news or even software/hardware updates and releases.

While waiting for “timed search” to become a standard I integrated it on Chromium ( Google Chrome users can follow this quick guide too ), to gain a faster access to it and make this tool an every hour companion for working. If you want to see the results, please jump to gallery.

Set up the new Search Engine

The procedure I followed is the same as creating a new search engine, so just right-click on the address bar and select Edit search engines , then click on add and fille the three fields with the following values:

• Name : Google Real Time
• Keyword : rt
• Url : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:h,sts:1&q=%s

After confirming the new search engine by clicking on ok, check that Google Real Time is present on your Other Search Engines list then close the dialog and start using it like any other search engine shortcut.

Real Time usage

Try typing rt on your chromium address bar and pressed tab on your keyboard to activate the search engine. Now type anything you want to search in real time and press return or click the arrow.

The address I used in this example for the search engine was calibrated to look for news newer then 1h. If you want to change this time you can hack the url anytime with the value that better suits your needings.

For example, if you want to see only last 5 minutes results you can use following url. For more examples and explanations on how to hack your timed results please have a look at omgili blog

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:h,sts:1&q=%s

Gallery

This is just a quick & (very) dirty trick to run Google ChromeChrome on linuxlinux using a precompiled debian package instead of compiling the enormous source tarball.

Step 1. Download the Deb

Get your browser to Developer Download page for Linux x86 and accept GoogleGoogle Terms of service.

Step 2. Unpack the unpackable

Open a terminal emulator and cd to your download directory ( mine is Desktop )

cd ~/Desktop
mv google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb /tmp
cd /tmp
ar x google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb
tar xvf data.tar.gz
sudo cp opt/google/chrome /opt/ -r
sudo ln -s /google/chrome/chrome /usr/bin/

Step 3. Link some libs

Chrome requires some libs which I didn’t find in my gentoo portage tree. Probably I could update nss and nspr but I prefer using stable ebuilds so I decided to manually link some missing libs…

ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libnss3.so.12 /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libnssutil3.so.12 /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libsmime3.so.12 /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nss/libssl3.so.12 /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libplds4.so.7 /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libplc4.so.7 /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
ln -s /usr/lib/nspr/libnspr4.so.7 /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

Step 4. Run it

If you want to simply launch it you just need to run chrome from anywhere.
If you want to create a launcher you can use chrome as command and choose an icon from /opt/chrome/

This is just a pre-release and many features are missing. Anyway I’m quite happy about having the possibility to try out Google Chrome without compiling it (it would be a cpu suicide I believe) and I noticed that it seems incredibly fast on launching. Maybe it’s because not all features have been built in, but it’s impressive in any case!

Here’s a screen I made from my Gentoo Box

The linux portal I manage receives 3000/4000 page views each day, revealed from different Analytics tools which works with Javascript, without any noscript.  This means that from those stats are completely excluded crawling bots, as they usually use perl scripts (or similar)  to fetch pages.

Yesterday I installed on my private server mod_defensible for apache2, a simple mod able to retrieve a blacklist of spammers, malevolous bots & company and to automatically give them a 403 error (access denied), so I decided to create a little report about the acceses on my server.

So using apache2 I created a new log, writing just some information I needed ( ip and unix timestamp ) and refining them (no css/images/js accesses, only .html and .php pages), and then a quick bash daemon that parses those logs and puts datas on my postgres DB every hour.

Results are amazing.

In 24 hours I got a total of 20500 accesses to linuxfeed and 9847 of those were made by 66.249.70.132. Know this guy? Yes it’s google… Ok I repeat in case you didn’t get it. 20500 access, 9847 by google.

That’s incredible but not enough. My ladder continues with 969 accesses from 74.6.17.151 (yahoo) , 903 from 66.249.71.237 (google again) and finally 340 from 67.195.37.89 (yahoo again). The total traffic I received from ‘good’ spiders is 12059 page views. This is more then an half of my whole site traffic. This is more then an half of my server load.

Then I focused on blocked bad guys stats. Mod_defensible did a great job stopping 6000+ accesses from blacklisted IPs. Particulary I noticed this guy ( 200.35.148.96 ) that made 5024 requests to my webserver. He received 5024 403 errors, perhaps this bot should have been coded in better way…

I just want to point out that I didn’t write those stats to criticize google or others search engines. If I want to be found on the net I’ll accept them to crawl me a lot. Google let’s you decrease crawling rate from webmaster tools (and I did id as soon as I saw these stats!) and the robots.txt lets you keep crawlers away. So you can decide in every moment to not be reached from everyone in the next months.

It’s just that I could not even imagine that their traffic might be even more (a lot more) then ‘real visitors’ and wanted to share my surprise… this web is perl-ed a lot!