A new project “Whats Google up to?”
I’ve put together a site based around a PHP script I’ve used myself for a while, its called “Whats Google Up to“. The script is very simple, it sends me an email any time Google refers a visitor to one of my sites showing me the search terms the person used.
This kind of info is easily available via logs or Google Analytics but I find its too easily forgotten when buried in there. I wanted to see these referrals come in as they were happening. Its especially fun to see some odd search terms people have searched for and ended up on my blog.
I built up a site around this script for a few reasons. Mainly, I have a good few ideas for this script. I’m developing it more and more to provide current information to myself as Google interacts in any way with a site of mine, such as when traffic is referred or when the robots.txt file is viewed.
Another reason for putting this site online is to allow other site owners or developers to get the script and use it on their own site. I’ve hosted this script using a free Beanstalk SVN account. I currently use Springloops for SVN for other projects and I was curious about Beanstalk so this gave me the opportunity to try it out.
Putting the site together was pretty quick. I used a free template from FreeCSStemplates, using the free Beanstalk account to version control the script and using SimplePie to aggregate the RSS updates to the repository on the site. The only cost was paying for the .com, which I bought through Blacknight for a whopping €6.25.
For anyone interested in playing around with this script, you can download it from the site or access its open SVN repository too. If you have any feedback or comments on it I’m all ears.
[...] recently wrote a PHP script to send me an email when Google refers any visitors to my website. It includes the search terms that a user was searching for and also the address of the page that [...]