ohh okay. There's a clue. Overwrite the gsearch on your server with this one:

Edit:removed, fixed in v1.2.2

and anyone else that was having a problem with different characters or the page being broken, use the above gsearch file.

Great, tpearl. This one is working. :up:
What was it? May be it?s to early, but what have you changed in the file? I?m to blind to see it.

It was the actual encoding on the file. I will be updating the package shortly.

Now is one month since I installed this mod, and I'd like to share my experience with it.

I don't have a big forum, at the moment I have about 5,500 pageviews a day, so you could have some idea about impact of this mod for your sites.

Anyway, the moment I installed it, the mod raised GCS pageviews. Before I had maybe 1, up to 10 GCS pageviews per day. Now I have abot 200 GCS pageviews per day.

Also, this means much bigger impact on clicks on ads there. In average I have about 10% clicks per pageviews, which is excellent. But you need to know, at least for my site, clicks in GCS are worth much less money. Anyway, I make about 20% of my income through GCS right now.

As Google shows both clicks (for content and for search) together, it looks like I have much more clicks with much less money for each click, but in total, I make more money.

Of course, I couldn't guarantee that same statistics would apply for your site too, but I think you certainly should see increase in your income, number of clicks (and probably, because of worth of search clicks, less money per click).

All in all, great mod, I voted for it as a mod of the month and it leads at the moment quite deservingly. :up:

Thanks for sharing your experience and I'm glad its working well for you :)

Well, thank you for your mod. :up:

It certainly makes us see more money with it. :D Great idea, that also works superbly. :)

Alan, that?s nice to hear and I have similar numbers. GCS and this mod are both implemented for 6 days now, I started using GCS with this mod. My forums have about 25.000 PI/d and a CTR at about 1,5%.

I was worried that this GCS-Link-Placement in the first post stands in direct competition with the placements Leaderboard_top and in_first_post, which are generating about 65% of the overall revenue.
In fact this mod has an impact on both placements in terms of clicks.

The following 3 screenshots should give an overview, how my site performs regarding display ad-units. Implementation of this GCS-Mod was July, 14th. (Monday):

Revenue (by placement violet: first_post, brown: leaderboard_top):

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/07/28.png


Clicks (by placement violet: first_post, brown: leaderboard_top):

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/07/29.png


AdRequests (by placement violet: first_post, brown: leaderboard_top):

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/07/30.png

So, as you can see, there is an untypical drop at the end of this week. No wonder, the weather in my site-reach area has changed from rainy and cloudy to super sunny. Like always, this has an impact on visitor numbers. Therefor I make the most of my income by Ads, I pray for arctic temperatures and cats n dogs for all of em, while sitting in my beach chair at the bahamas resorts, enjoying my 5th caipirinha. You know what I?m talking about - guess we all share the same dream, somehow ;)
But back to topic.


Google Custom Search - CPC

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/07/31.png

Google Custom Search - Clicks (orange colour)

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2014/07/32.png
The generated clicks indeed are concurrent to my main ad-placements. In total the GCS clicks are stealing 25% of the Ad-clicks from both other concurrent placements.
That?s a large number and I wasn't expecting this.

In total this Mod is deflecting only 4% of all AI's to the GCS-page - generating a CTR of 9,59% there. That sounds pretty darn good, but you have to take in account, that GCS-Ads are paid with only up to 1/3rd of the concurrent placements. On my site GCS has just been implemented and as you can tell by the graphs, CPC seems to raise as a result of gaining more adviters using the GCS placements on my site during the last days via GoogleAdWords.

At the moment I can see a decreasing overall revenue of 15%. This is a result mainly due the unwelcomed good weather (estimated on empiric stats: ~ -10%). So there is a 5% off left, that is related directly to the GCS on my site. Depending on how the CPC evolves in the upcoming weeks, I?ld expect an increasing overall revenue, but at least at the same level as before GCS started on my site.

At one glance:
This mod has the potential to increase your revenue, even if you can?t expect it to be significant from the start. You have to weight between the facts of another Ad-Placement that visitors don?t feel happy with and a potential revenue increase. But especially for sites not using display ads like leaderboard_top or in_first_post, this should be an unintrusive way to make some money out of your foums.

I will keep this mod on my site and watch closely, how things evolve. Hopefully I can give you a feedback in the near future, that shows more significant stats. I?m very positive, that this mod in fact helps increasing your revenue and I say "Thanks, tpearl!" for this mod. Keep up the good work :up:

Thanks for sharing your results Marv. I would revisit those stats in 3 weeks and compare the previous month. :) I encountered something similar, but since the ads on the search results paid out more, it made more sense and was more profitable in the long run.

That?s my conclusing, tpearl. I?ve just started working with GCS, so I guess the CPC should reach educated levels, soon ;)

Summer time is also bad for my pageviews. This winter I had about 11.000 pageviews a day (so my statistics are halved now).

It may be better to compare to a previous season if you had a similar ad setup then.

sorry John alot going on ..

John, btw:

regardless which browser used, sometimes it happens in an unregular pattern, that the gsearch.php searches for "ISO-8859-1". Seems something in the link before that is misformatted, misinterpreted or misunderstand from this link part http://www.myhost.com/gsearch.php?cx...Pi-Battalions- .

May be you have an idea and if you can spare the time have a look into it, if others can confirm that on their sites. Not a big deal though, happens in average each 5-15th request so it doesn?t bother me much.

I had then a bit different situation. Also, statistics was more or less "stable" before I installed your mod.

So I think this is pretty good info on what your mod did.

Try the gsearch file located above (the file is the same in the pro version)

That's really strange that it's only happening sometimes. Does it seem to depend on what is being searched for? (only special characters maybe?)
Ah I see, that works :)

That?s what I thought first, but no. With or without special chars, it?s the same.

BTW: May be you could put a WOL loaction in your mod. Otherwise the WOL-Page breaks the layout with this nearly mile-long link /gsearch.php?cx=0056669621380057560812695:ictv0snup i0&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Hartkern ;)

If you catch it in action, send me a screen shot.

I update the mod to include the WOL (1.2.2) :)

Hi
Nice mod.
I noticed the same issue as Marv regarding "ISO-8859-1" searches, instead of the full title search.
It happens only when there is a caracter with an accent in the title.
If you look at Marv's example, there is a "?" in the title.
I get the same problem with french accentuated letters in the titles. It returns a "ISO-8859-1" search.

Here is an axample:
http://www.lejapon.org/forum/threads...det?-gozaimasu
The link looks nice at the bottom (when you mouse over it), but when you click on it, you get a "ISO-8859-1" search and accentuated letters are replaced in the link.

Confirmed on my site too, John. I haden?t noticed the accentuate chars in my links.
Thanks for the head up, naisho :up:

Thanks. I think I finally figured out the problem with this. Allow overwrite with the xml below...

In case anyone wants to know the details, google prefers we don't encode the special characters and that's what I was doing. I took out the urlencoding function that does this. This works: http://www.lejapon.org/forum/gsearch...B4%20gozaimasu

Edit: removed attachment

no cigar with this issue. I deleted v 1.0 pro by mistake, that was working well for me.Can i get that version back? I need to get the search back online soon

No results at all makes me think something isn't configured correctly. Are you sure you didn't change something in Google Custom Search?

no, didn't change anything.I updated file and plugin, sec's later after testing nothing showed up.

And you allowed overwrite, right? Are the templates the default ones?

yep to all of the above.

found the problem originally you asked to add the "partner-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:xxxxxxxxx" i removed the "partner-pub" prefix and viola it worked.

iam haveing a problem with Arabic language ,It returns a "windows-1256"

Sorry, but I tried the new xml file (overwritting the previous one) and it does'nt work:
http://www.lejapon.org/forum/threads...paration-au-N4

I also tried to remove the charset included in the link with no success.

Ah, yes. I realized that partner-pub is not in everyone's ID. Only earlier accounts.
Did you try the xml above?
It does the same thing as before? What does one of your see more links look like now? You need the charset in the link for Google.

yes , I did.
english titles works good ,but if there is any
Arabic letter in the title It returns "windows-1256"

Yes exactly the same.

I am using your last xml file so you can check this link:
http://www.lejapon.org/forum/threads...paration-au-N4

Okay, try this one (allow overwrite)...

edit:removed

did not work.. now it returns letters like this "????? ???? 30 ???? ?? ????? ?????"

Alright I think I see what's going on now. Last try, then I give up on character encoding :)

didnt work .. return UTF-8

Can you paste here or pm me a thread page that links to the search page?

OK I found a solution to make it work.
I just replaced urlencode with utf8_encode and everything is fine now on my site.

Ah! That's the one combination of encoding that I didn't try! But what happens if you have an &, question mark, or comma in your title?

With question marks and commas it works fine.
When there is a & in the title, the part starting from & is stripped. But it's not a big deal as this kind of titles are rare (0,5% on my forum)
Example here:
http://www.lejapon.org/forum/threads...en-train-metro