Search with Design

So I’m completely addicted to Yahoo! Pipes, the new service which allows you to create mashups of RSS feeds, as well as maps, user inputs, etc. There are even a few logical functions available to help you organize the data.

My first few forays into the pipes-world were somewhat disappointing due mostly to the fact that I was trying to do things with the interface that are a little bit out of it’s league.

My first project was an attempt to take Shoemoney’s website market RSS feed, parse out the URLs of sites for sale, and reconstruct them with Pagerank and Pages Indexed values to provide more stats on sites for sale. This failed because I couldn’t find a way to return PageRank values into my pipes.

So, for my first couple rounds, I have a couple of requests for future Pipes iterations: more logical operators and more ways to get information.

So, for my most recent project, I decided to tackle a more simple project, but one that requires lots of leg (finger) -work when you do it by hand: finding link partners for SEO.

The tried-and-true method (as described here) is to type queries like [mykeyword “add a link”] into your favorite search engine to find websites in your topic that participate in link exchanges. This can take a very long time, but if you could mashup all the permutations of “add a link” “add a site” “add site” “submit link”, etc. into one RSS feed, then you could pull it into your favorite reader or live bookmark folder and knock a few out when you have time. Plus, you’ll be updated whenever a new links page enters your space.

Enter the SWD LinkPartners pipe. My only complaint after building this pipe is that I can never reopen it without saving. As you can see (screenshots below), I have used quotation marks to help my searches be more targeted, which works fine until I try to reopen the Pipe, when the “s get translated into “s and the whole search breaks down. Since I can’t use the Yahoo! Search pieces by URL, I have to drop this text in. Too bad I’ll never get to open this Pipe again.
You can use it here. And what follows are a few screenshots of the pipe being built:

Here is the overall blueprint that Yahoo! shows for this Pipe. Woohoo, look at all them pipes!

Here is a close up of some of the boxes used to process the search terms. ‘String Concatenate’ boxes join the user-input ‘keyword’ with the different search commands, and then feed them to the search-term field of the Yahoo! search engines.

I lovingly refer to this area as the ‘Junction Box’. This is where all of the seperate Yahoo! search feeds are mashed together into one massive, free-link-love list that can be applied to any vertical.

I should probably mention at this point that this kind of link-building is becoming more extinct by the day, as more people exploit this tactic to gain rankings. However, in less-competitive markets you can still get some benefit, so you may as well use this pipe to get what you can, while you can!