[Techtalk] Re: [prog] Writting a program to automatically fetch webpages, and fill in forms.

Dan dan at cellectivity.com
Thu Mar 24 20:08:49 EST 2005


> in particular Net::Google, Net::Google::Search and WWW::Scraper::Google.
> 
> Note that you may have to register for a Google Web API account and have 
> a valid Google API license key to do this kind of thing.

Just to clarify, Google has an API for developers that allows you to do 
just the type of thing you want to do:
    http://www.google.co.uk/apis/
To use the API, you have to be registered with them (it's free).

More importantly, you are limited to 1000 searches per day. So if you 
give this program to doctors, they will have to each register 
independently. It doesn't seem to be very difficult to register, but 
it's one more thing that the user has to set up.

In addition, the FAQ uses words like "experimental" and "beta" to 
describe the API. One question asks whether Google plans to start 
charging for the service as soon as it gets popular, to which Google 
replies: "Not at this time." Not very reassuring. So you have no 
guarantee that the API is going to be around tomorrow.

I get the impression that some Perl modules use the API (such as 
Net::Google::Service), others don't (such as WWW::Scraper::Google).

-- 
   [M]y wife and I attended grad school in linguistics at Berkeley
   and UCLA. At the time, we were actually planning to be
   missionaries (more specifically, Bible translators), but we had
   to drop that idea for health reasons. Funny thing is, now the
   missionaries probably get more good out of Perl than they'd have
   gotten out of me as a missionary. Go figure.
      - Larry Wall (inventor of Perl)


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