On his site today Sameer Borate shares a tutorial showing you how to access Google Insights data via your PHP application with the help of the dsentker/phpinsights package.

Google Page Insights is a required tool to have when analyzing the speed and usability of your site. As you may know these metrics influence how google ranks your page in search results. If you frequently make changes to your web site designs than it becomes mandatory to check the metrics after each change to make sure that the design changes has not affected the score in any negative way. If you have many pages to test than manual testing can quickly become cumbersome.

Thankfully there are libraries that you can use to automate this process. Once such is given in this post which allows you to get Google Page Insight metrics using PHP.

He then walks you through the installation of the package (via Composer) and how to use it, along with your Google API key, to fetch the information for a given URL. You can get information for different environments (desktop vs mobile) and even a screenshot of the page that's under test. He ends the post with a helpful hint for those that might get a certificate error when making the request and how to fix it.

On the Laravel News site there's a post showing an application of the IBM Watson Personality Insights service to discover trends and make predictions about future actions/preferences. They also show how to integrate it into your Laravel-based application thanks to this package.

One of the most important things as a business owner is being able to understand your customers’ needs and wants; such that you are able to offer them a personalized experience. This works great if you know your customers on a personal level, but what if you don’t?

[...] Sure you could send out a survey from your site, then collect a huge amount of data, then process, analyze and finally being able to tell what package fits which user. This seems tiresome and plus people’s tastes and preferences change over time and you would have to repeat this process over and over again each time you want to offer them something new. There has to be a better way, and there is.

The post talks about the services offered by IBM Watson and, more specifically, about Personality Insights. They cover some about what this service offers as related to web preferences and link to a demo application you can use to get more context about its handling. The post wraps up showing how to integrate the package into your application and working with requests/responses to the IBM Watson Personality Insights service.