I have struggled on and off for the past month or so, trying to figure out why my custom search engine does not properly track searches from the SQL Hunter main page. It is supposed to be connected to my Adsense account, which will track the number of queries per day, along with the number of embedded advertisements shown to the users as well as the number of ad-clicks.
The current SQL Hunter main page is built with Google's AJAX API which is quite impressive to say the least. AJAX is beyond my current understanding of web-style programming languages, however I am able to hack my way through examples and can pretty much get things working.
What I could not understand until today is why the Adsense portion is not behaving properly. I posted calls for help in the various Google support groups (Custom Search Engine, AJAX, Adsense, etc.) but I have had no success, until earlier today. A friendly chap in the Google Custom Search Newsgroup named Woody helped me quite a bit and got me on the right track.
Today I stumbled across the Google AJAX Search API BLog which states that the AJAX API is in beta, and as such the advertisers are not charged for inclusion in the results. Consequently, my adsense account is not connected to the search results and that explains why I am not seeing the query statistics that I was expecting.
Had I only known this a month ago, I probably would have not chosen to use the AJAX example, and instead used a more traditional example which is not a slick, but certainly delivers the search results to the users and the query statistics to the data junkies like me.
At least now I know that I did not break anything in my hacked out AJAX code. Like many Google products that I have come to rely on daily it is still in beta.
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