Position reporting software

Do any accept Japanese characters

[Adam_C]

I have just realised that I can't copy'n'paste Japanese characters into Web Position Gold.

Does anyone know if any of the others can handle them?

I know SE Commando has a good range of international search engines, but can it deal with this?

[bill]

Adam_C I haven't used any rank checkers on Japanese SEs because they generally violate the TOS of most of these engines. However if you are using this software I am pretty sure that WPG never supported Japanese engines. SE Commando and TopDog do have Japanese engines listed, so I'd assume that they handle Japanese keywords. There are some Japanese native tools that you may see if you search for them, but they usually require a Japanese operating system to run them.

[Adam_C]

WPG2 does have a range of .co.jp SE's, but doesn't do the business.

Hopefully one of the others will.

[Adam_C]

For anyone interested: I've been in touch with FPS/WPG and SEC and neither support jp characters at the moment.

Awaiting response from Top Dog

[bill]

Thanks Adam_C. Please tell us what you find. Occasionally we do get people asking about this so it would be good to point them to this thread.

I find it surprising that these tools would go to the trouble of supporting Japanese engines, but not allow you to check rankings for Japanese KWs.

[Woz]

I just checked all the Positioning Software of which I am familiar, and WPG/SEC/TD are indeed the only ones who list Japanese Search Engines in their SED list. I wonder however how much effort would be required to support additional character sets and whether hat effort is ecnomically justafiable at this point? Unless we make a big enough noise here I suspect not, which is unfortunate.

Onya
Woz

[fathom]

what about google api? I doubt you can get a feed from the jp regional but I suspect the characters are supported.

[whats up skip]

There is another way.

Many search engines such as Google convert the Japanese characters to code. Just look at the URL when the search results come up.

Example:
オーストラリア - Australia in Japanese
Try it on Google Japan [google.co.jp]

Now if you enter into the Google search box
%E3%82%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%83%A9%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A2

You should receive the same search results. Now place this into many of your search engine position software and they should take it because it is not Japanese.

Now all you have to do is solve the terms of use policy and you have a solution.

[edited by: Woz at 2:13 am (utc) on June 14, 2003]
[edit reason] fixed Side Scroll [/edit]

[Woz]

Nice try Skip. Have you seen the results when you plug that string into Google? ;)

Unless I am missing something.

Onya
Woz

[bill]

...I confer Woz...that's an interesting concept, but I'm not seeing anything in those SERPs that have anything to do with "Australia".

[Woz]

What I found amusing was the way Google tried to suggest a spelling correction, suggestion that the whole string was correct but for 2 digits. Close, but no Cigar!

Onya
Woz

[Adam_C]

Just got an email back from from Top Dog saying currently the software is not unicode, so it will not handle Japanese characters. It does handle extended ascii character though. But they're not sure if that helps.

Neither am I?!?!?!

[bill]

I think they would need to tell you whether the software can handle double-byte characters common to Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Extended ASCII character support won't help you with Asian languages.

I am very surprised that all of these software packages went to the trouble of adding Japanese search engines to their product, but do not support the character sets. What's the point?

[globalseo]

TopDog and WebPosition Gold 2.0 will accept and return results for Japanese characters when those characters are entered directly into the application from a computer with a Japanese O/S. Obviuosly does not help those who have to cut and paste Japanese.

In the process of testing a few others now.

[bill]

TopDog and WebPosition Gold 2.0 will accept and return results for Japanese characters when those characters are entered directly into the application from a computer with a Japanese O/S.

I wonder if that holds true for those who use Microsoft's Global IME to input Japanese on a non-Japanese OS...

Obviously does not help those who have to cut and paste Japanese.

I know of some trouble copying Japanese from some Microsoft Office applications and then pasting into other Microsoft products. It seems that a lot of the character formatting information gets copied into the clipboard. The work-around I had always reverted to was to paste the text into a plain text editor like Notepad, and then try copying and pasting from there.

Regardless, I think you would have to have the appropriate language packs and input editors installed for this to work on a non-Japanese system. Even if you don't know how to write Japanese I think a lot of essential language support files are installed when you add that to a Windows system.

[Adam_C]

I wonder if that holds true for those who use Microsoft's Global IME to input Japanese on a non-Japanese OS...

I'm downloading it now - lets see what happens.

[Adam_C]

For some unknown reason, the install didn't work.

globalseo:

TopDog and WebPosition Gold 2.0 will accept and return results for Japanese characters when those characters are entered directly into the application from a computer with a Japanese O/S.

If the Japanese characters were entered into a WPG2 reporter mission file on a Japanese O/S, do you think it (the mission file) could be copied onto a non-jp O/S and still retain the desired keyword characters?

[bill]

For some unknown reason, the install didn't work.

There are different incarnations of the IME depending on your OS and the version of Office you're using. I don't even know if it's still called an IME ;). The earliest versions only worked with IE and allowed you to input Japanese in on-line forms...that was about it. The latest versions integrate with all of the Office programs and extend the ability to read and write CJK in almost everything installed on your PC. I would look around the MS KB and see what the optimal setting is for your combination of software.

do you think it (the mission file) could be copied onto a non-jp O/S and still retain the desired keyword characters?

I haven't used the newer version of WPG, but the older version produced reports on HTML pages. If you can copy a Japanese HTML page from a Japanese OS to your machine then the WPG reports should work as well...that is if they are still making their reports the same way...

[globalseo]

Adam_C

I did the test that you requested and it did not work. The test ran fine on the Japanese system but when I ran the same mission on and English system capable of handling Japanese and it did not work. It did not find any results and the Japanese was broken.

[bill]

Which software did you test?

Are the WPG reports still in HTML? It would be pretty easy to move those off the Japanese machine once finished.

[a2ztranslate]

hmm, working in Japanese does pose difficulties: e.g. copying from an excel spreadsheet to a word document is not possible in office for mac osX. likewise office does not handle charcter sets such as thai very well. there has been a beta release of the open source office suite for mac (similar to the open source star office suite for wintel) that does guarantee to support all unicode compliant charcter sets, that could get you over your first problem. i have not installed yet myself.

one very simple workaround i have used is doing everything in html email. all translations etc are moved from point to point in htmal email; this preserves charcter encoding well (even in thai etc.) across OS types and applications.

as to the rank reporting software, no luck there. would love to find out to save me hours of cutting and pasting!

[bill]

hmm, working in Japanese does pose difficulties: e.g. copying from an excel spreadsheet to a word document is not possible in office for mac osX.

That's unfortunate. Windows Office has had that ability since Office 2000 or so. I always thought Mac had better language support. It certainly did back in the Office 95 days when I had to dual boot to use any Japanese.