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I just found out that Google sells a Google Search Appliance I was surprised that it gets away with the prices it charges. This thing is nothing but a box which indexes documents you point it to and then lets you perform searches on it. The only cool thing this appliance does is that in indexes 220 different file formats.

Integrating everything is nice and all but charging $30,000+ per box is thievery. The software is trivial to write and the hardware doesn’t need to be extraordinary. The Google trademark plays a BIG factor here.

I am surprised there is no open source project out there which aims to tackle this.

After wading through the google documentation I finally found out why the adsense ads on my blog don’t match the content.

The relevant document

What it says is, you can tag your HTML content

• to emphasize or
• to ignore regions.

Aha. So what that meant was my sidebar was screwing google’s keyword selector resulting in sub-optimal ads. Armed with that knowledge, I quickly hacked my typo install to have google ignore sidebar content.

The tags

To emphasize:

<!--google_ad_section_start-->
<!--google_ad_section_end-->

To ignore:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

The change to typo:

cd typodir/themes/mytheme/layouts/

Edit the default.rhtml file so that you put the ignore comments from above around the sidebar rendering. Your default.rhtml should look like

...
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<%= render_sidebars %>
<!-- google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) -->
...