Presents your 
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for November 21, 2002

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SEARCH WITH GOOGLE WITH A FREE API

HTML scraping--using a program to read data from a Web page--is a dodgy
affair, because you have to deal with poor HTML code, with changing
pages, and with companies who are trying to stop your scraping from 
working.
However, Google's release of a Java client API saves us from the 
painful scraping of that search engine.

Google is currently offering a free beta service that provides a
client-side API that communicates with their server. The service allows
developers to issue search requests, access the Google cache, and check 
on the spelling of words.

The service itself is a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) service;
this is an XML protocol for making requests in an object-oriented way. 
Most importantly, this means that the Google service is open to all 
languages that can support SOAP. Google also supplies a Java library to 
relieve developers from the SOAP setup process.

To get access to the API, you download the code and sign up for a client
key. The key, made up of a string of 32 alphanumeric characters, allows
a developer to make 1,000 requests a day.
http://www.google.com/apis/

The Java API begins with a GoogleSearch class. The client key is
associated with this class and one of three searches may be requested. 
First, a keyword search may be performed with the following code:

import com.google.soap.search.*;

    ....

        GoogleSearch searcher = new GoogleSearch( );
        // insert your own key here
        searcher.setKey("xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx");
        searcher.setQueryString("java builder");
        GoogleSearchResult result = searcher.doSearch( );
        System.out.println(result);

Second, a cached page can be accessed:

import com.google.soap.search.*;

    ....

        GoogleSearch searcher = new GoogleSearch( );
        // insert your own key here
        searcher.setKey("xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx");
        byte[ ] page = searcher.doGetCachedPage("http://java.sun.com");
        System.out.println(new String(page));

Lastly, a spelling suggestion can be obtained:

import com.google.soap.search.*;

    ....

        GoogleSearch searcher = new GoogleSearch( );
        // insert your own key here
        searcher.setKey("xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx");
        String suggestion = searcher.doSpellingSuggestion("jave");
        System.out.println(suggestion);

The Google Web API is a neat tool that developers can tuck into their
toolset or integrate into internal applications. The limitation on a
thousand requests a day stops a small industry starting up at Google's 
expense, and provides a good example of a Web service.

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