Embedded Google Doc Viewer Links no longer working - google-docs

For a long time, the following href worked to embed a google doc viewer to all sorts of document types (when used in association with something like fancybox):
var href = "https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=" + my_url + "&embedded=true";
However, as of a day or 2 ago this no longer works AND the support page at Google:
Google Doc Viewer
Just redirects to the Google Docs homepage. (It used to provide a way to get the 'viewer link' by inputting your document's url.)
Anyone else running into this issue?

I also noticed that this was no longer working. It was an undocumented feature back when we started using it years ago, and Google has a habit of pulling the plug suddenly on entire divisions, so it wouldn't be a stretch to see them killing this feature.

Looks like this suddenly started working again a few days ago. The Google Doc Viewer link above still doesn't go to a dedicated page for the feature (it just redirects you to your Google Drive homepage), but the embedded doc viewer is again working. I guess Google can giveth and taketh away at any time. :)

Related

Fetch as Google - Temporarily Unreachable ONLY on Mobile

I have created a new website www.bucketshowers.com and I tried to index it using google webmaster tools. Fetch as Google for the desktop worked just fine, but doing the same for mobile shows an error "Temporarily unreachbale". It's been a few days and the website REALLY is not avaible on mobile. It's driving me nuts. Here're is some information and things I have already tried:
Website is made with WP
I have disabled all SEO/meta tags plugins and I added a very basic robots.txt http://bucketshowers.com/robots.txt
I tried waiting 15min between fetching the root page on mobile
I have checked source code for the homepage to make sure there are no meta tags with nofollow or noindex attributes
I baffled by this issue and I would gladly take any advise/pointers what else can be done. Thank you.
The crazy thing was, that it was caused by WP Statistics plugin, which is probably the most popular from its kind - 500k downloads. When I deactivated it, everything is fine, google fetches of the mobile and the website is available. Incredible! I'm still searching for the actual problem within that plugin.

Google servers see website differently

I Googled one of our sites today (gamestyling.com) and saw that the results where in Chinese. It looks like our site was hacked but I see no traces of that. When opening the site all looks normaal (no Chinese).
On further inspection it seems that Google doesn't see the website correctly:
I cannot verify in Google search console. When I use the meta tag it shows me it detected a completely different tag.
When running pagespeed insight the preview does show Chinese: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=gamestyling.com
Also, when running the site through a proxy it looks completely normal.
Any idea how I can get Google to see my site correctly or what is causing this issue?
UPDATE
I now have access to Google search console and found that someone already had access to the property (2nd user):
I cannot remove the user because it uses a meta tag that google thinks is still in the header but doesn't appear in my code. So I'm still not sure if someone is playing tricks on Google or that we've been actually hacked. Note; nothing has changed on the server itself.
UPDATE2
This article describes exactly what's going on; https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/09/malicious-google-search-console-verifications.html. I must say that's an amazing safety fault on Google's part...
I had experienced this issue on one of the site and resubmitted website for review in google webmasters. Search results in google were corrected in couple of days.

Bing Maps no longer runs KML files ref by mapurl

One of my Android trip tracking apps stores a KML file on my server and sends the user of the app a URL pointing to the file.
Example:
http://bing.com/maps/default.aspx?mapurl=http://www.deanblakely.com/REST/KML/Timeout2016-03-09084829AM3142016348PMmawardjrgmail.kml
It has been working for several years but now it no longer works displaying a misleading error saying "This content is not available. It may have been deleted by the author".
So what is going on? I recall that Google Maps dropped support for KML a year or so ago. Has Bing done the same?
I have ran links that used to work that don't work now. I know the links are good.
Regards,
Dean
Take a look at your KML URL. When I try and running it in a browser I see an error on your server.

Retrieve Google results without using the Custom Search API

Recently I've been working on an idea that requires me to query Google Images and retrieve links for images matching that search term. My most promising candidate for a usable Google Images API was the Google Web Search API, but it looks like it's going to be going out of service as of tomorrow:
https://developers.google.com/web-search/docs/
The API that replaced it is the Google Custom Search API, but it's a little discouraging to use:
Google API Custom Search with Python - Programmatic Search Results
100 search results a day is a very strict limit; that's just four searches per hour. I also don't want to have to go through the hassle of creating some custom search bar that I'm never going to use except through Python
I decided to turn to parsing HTML directly from the results page. This presents a problem, though, because nowhere inside the page's HTML is there any direct link to the image, only referrer URLs. This is true of the javascript-enabled and javascript-disabled versions of Google Images (so even if Python spoofs javascript as enabled, nothing). I'm not sure where to go from here. Could anyone refer me to some obscure, updated library that I've somehow overlooked, or give me some pointers?
You could use Selenium Webdriver to actually execute the JavaScript and click on the images in the thumbnail view. Once an image has been opened, the link is in the DOM and you can scrape it from there. All Webdriver does is open an actual browser and simulate a user. You can even run it as a headless browser if you use xvfbwrapper. The downside is that even then, you will need all the dependencies of the browser you are using installed on your server.
However, scraping Google is against their terms of service and they will make an effort of blocking you as quickly as possible. So, unless you pass through the captchas (which are linked to sessions), you will possibly not be able to make a whole lot of searches before being blocked this way, either.

Sharepoint - Accessing PDF links via Chrome

Firstly let me state that I have zero experience with Sharepoint so this may be a pretty stupid question.
I started a new job yesterday and part of the induction is viewing the company literature via their Sharepoint portal. I've noticed that whenever I try to access an embedded PDF link via Chrome it seems like it's a broken link and appears to do a Google search instead. Yet when I try the exact same steps using IE all works as expected.
I don't want to raise this with my boss if it's going to make me look a little stupid! Is there some cross browser issue with PDF links?
Thanks.
Darren, try flushing the cache in Chrome, and if necessary, log off and log back into your computer. We've had the same problem with Chrome and Google doesn't seem to be fixing the problem (although they might point the finger back at Microsoft).
Yes I have the same issue with Chrome and Firefox
Sharepoint is optimized for IE and vice versa
You also can't open Files with the "Check in and Check out" functionality because only IE is able to do that from Sharepoint (Other Browsers will just Download the File)
You can try using AddOns like IE-Tab
(simply uses the IE algorithms within FF and Chrome for specific Sites)
But its better to use Sharepoint with IE

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