keyword-highlights

keywords from google-queries are highlighted. nice!

[albertep]

I visited webmasterworld following a link from a google query "flash" and "searchengine". I was sent to your forum, where the keywords from the google-query were highlighted. Probably because of some arguments that were sent along?
I want to make use of just that for a flash-site. If a google visitor
performs a search on the name of for example an artist, and he/she clicks that link, it's obviously possible to send this user to the appropiate flashpage and load the appropiate info from the database.
How did webmasterworld go about this?

[Brett_Tabke]

By reading the referral string from Google. How you'd do that in each application is different.

[Marcia]

Welcome to the board, albertep.

I want to make use of just that for a flash-site. If a google visitor performs a search on the name of for example an artist, and he/she clicks that link, it's obviously possible to send this user to the appropiate flashpage and load the appropiate info from the database.

If a Google visitor performs a search for a particular artist, a specific page for that artist would have to come up at Google for them to be able to click on the link to your site.

What you're talking about is custom delivering a back-end queried page for the artist generated on the fly based on the search engine query done at Google. That couldn't be done without the page first being indexed at Google for the artist's name.

If a person is looking for famous guitarists, for example, and types in Jimi Hendryx at Google, you couldn't rank for guitarists at Google and deliver the Hendryx page on the fly based on their Google search if they click on your guitar page. It couldn't work that way, there would have to be a specific page come up for the searcher, which is not an easy matter with a Flash site.

[Woz]

True Marcia, although you could "fine tune" the page based on the search query.

For example, lets say you have a basic page selling music CDs in the Jazz, R&B and Dance categories, and you have a section on the page for Specials.

Someone comes to that page looking for "Jazz CDs", so you use that query string to list some Jass CDs in the "Specials" section of the page.

Onya
Woz

[Marcia]

I can see that Woz, but the point I'm making is that if something like "jazz CDs" is the query string they'll have to find the page at Google coming up for that phrase. You couldn't deliver a whole page on the fly based on a query string.

To highlight a section based on the query string is a different matter, I doubt if Flash has that capability, or even if it's a backend routine, if you could highlight a section on a page that's pure Flash.

There could be plain text pages to rank for the individual search terms, and then when people arrive by clicking on the link at the search engine, sniff for the Flash plug-in and send them to a corresponding Flash page.

[albertep]

Thanks for the lively discussion sofar :-), but I think I have to state my point clearer.
I think Brett is the closest to what i mean. It is actually very simple.
I want to know what the initial search-string was, that made the user come to my Flash-site. How can I read this out? Is that by reading the referral string? How do i do this?
It would be the ideal situation if this string is in an url-encoded format so that Flash could read this string. With the variables i collect in this way i can direct the user to its requested information.
My specific application in this case is Flash, but the principle is nothing different when you use for example a database-driven html-site.
The bottomline is that I know what the user was looking for.

Greets, Albert

[Brett_Tabke]

>Is that by reading the referral string? How do i do this?

Open your server manual to the section on environment variables. You have some reading and catching up to do. ;-)