[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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