I figured I’d announce that I’ve decided to scale back the ads on this web site. Something about putting ads on this blog has always felt a little odd to me. The extra revenue is nice, but I’m not sure its actually worth the commercialization ads bring.

There are still two ads on the site, the Google Custom Search box on this blog’s sidebar, and an ad on the Text Ascii Art Generator (TAAG). The search box is actually functionally useful and the ad on TAAG will still allow a little bit of change to trickle into the site. I don’t plan on adding any more ads until I need to upgrade hosting services.

Part of me wanted to justify my decision with the idea that “ads turn away visitors”, so I decided to make a chart pitting TAAG (which has an ad) and against the VB Array Tutorial (which doesn’t have any ads). Surprisingly, it appears that the ad on on TAAG didn’t have a noticeable negative impact on the number of visitors it received:

This might be like comparing apples to oranges, since both pages probably appeal to a different group of people. However, TAAG’s ad was added in April, so if it bothered visitors I’d expect its growth to go down after April, but instead it seems to have continued on with the normal growth of this site (the spike in June is due to it being popular on StumbleUpon for a few days). This doesn’t change my opinion on removing ads from the blog, I still feel they add an unwanted commercial element to a personal outlet, however, I figured I’d post up this chart for those of you interested in how ads may/may not effect site growth.

Most people are pretty familiar with Google’s Advanced Search Operators. You can use them to more preciously search for web pages or particular data. Anyway, earlier today I discovered that Microsoft’s search engine, live.com, has an amusingly useful search operator that Google doesn’t have. It’s called linkfromdomain. Now, this isn’t new news. I did some Googling and the operator has been around since late 2006, however, since not very many people use live.com, I figured some of you might find this info useful.

The linkfromdomain operator allows you to search the websites that a particular website links to. For example, if you search for “linkfromdomain:patorjk.com“, you’d get a list of all of the sites I link to throughout this website. At first glance this may not seem that useful, however, it allows you to ask some interesting questions as an individual and as a webmaster. Here are some examples:

• Does patorjk.com link to any questionable websites? Example: “nsfw linkfromdomain:patorjk.com“
• Does patorjk.com have any reciprocal links? Example: “linkfromdomain:patorjk.com inbody:patorjk.com” [side note: this isn't perfect since I'm using the "inbody" operator instead of the "link" operator, however, live.com's "link" operator doesn't seem to work that well.]
• What youtube.com videos have been submitted to reddit, but not digg? Example: “(site:youtube.com linkfromdomain:reddit.com) AND -(site:youtube.com linkfromdomain:digg.com)“
• Which xkcd comics aren’t listed on reddit? Example: “(site:xkcd.com) AND -(site:xkcd.com linkfromdomain:reddit.com)” [side note: This isn't perfect, as live.com doesn't index all of reddit, it's pretty close though.]

I don’t think Google currently has the ability to answer any of those questions, which is a little surprising. Anyway, there are probably lots of other neat questions you can form using the linkfromdomain operator. It’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re surfing the web.