|
Business
Net services based on Google's web APIs service
A FEW months ago Google opened its database for public access and released software tools that enable programs to directly access the database. This has prompted many web programmers to launch innovative services using this huge database. NetSpeak examines some of them this week.
A Net service that is enjoyed by netizens — from the highly skilled Net professionals to its ordinary users — is the search engine Google (http://www.google.com). Apart from maintaining this effective search service, Google developers keep regularly floating new services and products. Google labs (featured in this column sometime ago), seen as a technology playground of Google's developers and users, is an example showing the proactive nature of Google's managers. Here, Google's developers post their service/product prototype on to the labs and invite interested users to provide feedback.
Some of the other notable services that have emerged from Google are: Google answers (http://answers.google.com/) — a forum where queries are answered by researchers.
Google News (http://news.google.com/) can be used to search and scan news items collected from around 4,000 news sources across the world; Special Google searches (http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html) allow the users to do specific topic based searches.
Apart from providing the users with several innovative services as Google also provides many tools that facilitate more efficient use of its services. Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/), and Google Translate tool (http://www.google.com/language_tools) are examples of products that fall in this category.
Google API
One of the brilliant moves of Google that has attracted a lot of attention is the publication of a few software tools that give application developers access to its numerous web pages, and allow them to build on-line applications based on these pages. The tools, called web APIs (Application Program Interface), give the programmers the ability to search Google's web database directly from their programs. To invoke a search process from his program, a developer just needs to use a function provided by Google with appropriate parameters. Using the web APIs, provided by Google, developers can search the Google's database, accept results and manipulate them. The APIs that can be used to search the Google cache and check the spelling of words are also available. The only requirement to use Google APIs service (http://www.google.com/apis/) is that you need to create an account and obtain a license key.
This ability to directly access Google's database has fired the imagination of both professional developers and hobby programmers resulting in several new and innovative services.
Google via e-mail: Though most of us have access to the web, there are still many who don't have proper web access, like people on a slow Net link. To provide such and others who are unable to browse the Net, professionals at Capescience have developed an e-mail based search service using the Google's API facility. The service Capmail (http://www.capescience.com/google/) enables the user to receive the search results from Google through e-mail. To receive the search results, you just need to send an e-mail to the address google@capeclear.com, putting the search string into the subject field. Once the query is sent the results will come to your mailbox.
Google API web search
by host (GAWSH)
Among the links produced by Google in its search output, many might have come from the same host. Google does not have any mechanism that can provide a user with a list that contains only host links. The on-line service created by using Google API, `Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH — http://www.staggernation.com/gawsh/)' can be used to obtain a list of web hosts found in the result set. The service lists hosts from ten result pages, at a time, with the `Next' button that can be used to move to the next set. To the left of each host you can see a triangle icon, which can be clicked to read all the result pages from a particular host. The triangle can also be used to fold the expanded list from a host.
Another service available at this site is the `Relation Browsing Outliner', which can be used to get links that are related to a web site. The service accesses the Google database and presents a list of pages that are related to the URL submitted by the user. By clicking on the triangle icon, displayed next to each link in the related site list, you can find pages that are related to these pages. Access the service at: http://www.staggernation.com/ garbo/
Touch Graph Google Browser: Through Google's `similar pages' feature, we can obtain a text listing of sites related to a web site. But this linear list is incapable of bringing out the interconnectedness of various links. To get a better understanding of a site's web relationships, try out the Touch Graph Google browser service that reveals the relationship of a site with other similar sites graphically. The service (http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html) presents many features that can be used to explore the web relationships more deeply. When you start the service, you will get a graph of interconnected nodes that can be navigated by clicking and dragging nodes.
Mangle — Random link generator: As already mentioned, Google APIs service allows a user to access the millions of web pages in its database. Using this facility, the service, Mangle (http://erics.freeshell.org/mangle/mangle.html), has been designed to generate a random link from Google's two billion pages. To use the service you need to possess the API license key.
Resources
A technical article on web APIs: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/ view/wlg/1283
A good tutorial on using Google APIs with PHP: http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side /PHP/GoogleAPI/page1.html
J. Murali
Email the author at:
murali27@satyam.net.in
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Business
|
