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Google to Offer API
philipx writes "From the ruby-talk archives here's a little interesting snippet from a post you have to check out:
"Here at Google, we're about to start offering an API to our
search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through
a clean and clearly defined interface, rather than have to resort to
parsing HTML." It goes on talking about SOAP and I think this is utterly cool."
Considering most of their money is made through licensing their search technology to other searching outfits and businesses, they shouldn't have any trouble making money.
You could write a program that would use Google as its back-end search engine for the Internet. That program could be sold and anyone can use it on their computer. For instance, I can imagine Apple using that API for their Sherlock search application. Just because the software that uses it is distributed doesn't mean that it violates the license. As long as the results are not redistributed (i.e. in your own public web site), and the search is initiated only upon request from the user and it not some kind of cron job, then it's okay. Apple's Sherlock and Mozilla's search tools both conform.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
In order to DoS Google it doesn't really matter whether you bang on the front door or the back door.
In fact, an attack through the front door will be more likely to succeed because you're hitting the rendering engine, which takes a lot more CPU time (believe it or not) than the search engine.
OTOH the back door is lightweight and is as such advantageous for not only third parties but also Google itself to employ.
Besides, if you're being abused, if you don't want to use technological avenues to keep miscreants away, you can always use legal ones.
No, they don't sell any of the search result slots. They sell ads above and to the right of the search results, but these do not affect the search results themselves.
- Amit
They could actually charge for a devkit or usage to break even on the project. Even if it did costsome money, I could see it being well worth the price, if it works well.
.NET Framework community website.
I just wonder how it will tie into my app. Will it open my browser? Will the Google Bar plugin be the foundation?
The post describes a SOAP web service which in most cases is an RPC call in your application of choice. However unlike RPC in days of yore using SOAP to do RPC in applications is relatively easy. If you want to learn more about SOAP I suggest reading A GEntle Introduction To SOAP by Sam Ruby for an overview of the protocol and A Busy Developer's Guide to WSDL 1.1 to see how one could go from defining a WSDL file (as the Google sys admin is trying to do) to actually accessing the web service remotely from a Java application.
There is also a grab bag of resources on XML webservices at the
To answer your question, if the Google API is available as a web service then it can be intergrated into any application at all from command line to dynamic web page to GUI application as long as there is network availability on the host machine.
A hack and a half, but it actually works!
They do an output without HTML already, but it looks like they've restricted access to it. Comparet =p rotocol4t =w ashingtonpost? hl=en&q=blah&output=u nclesam
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blah&outpu
with
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blah&outpu
with
http://www.google.com/search
-nonymous
Google does not have a pay for placement plan - if you are making reference to the practice of changing the order of search results based on advertiser dollars.
That was the very thing that turned people onto Google. I very much doubt that they would change that.
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
http://www.google.com/xml?q=slashdot
You'll (probably) get an error page.
I read about this on Scripting News in February:
Dave Winer made an inquiry to Google about accessing this XML API.
Their initial response was not very helpful, asking for the link to be removed, and saying that the link is "obviously reserved for Google partners." Eventually, Google let Dave access the API. Now, he sounds like he's under NDA about this.
Ever heard of it?