

Google Search NoAPI - wslh
http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/

======
mark_l_watson
I was an early user of the SOAP search API - definitely disappointing when
that was shut down.

For several years, I have been using the Bing search API for very low volume
stuff - works really well.

------
landyman
Google has told me (and other users of the now deprecated AJAX Search API) to
switch to their paid Custom Search API.

The new API is missing some features that were in the old API, which is
unfortunate. And, also unfortunate, the most accurate Google results (Local,
Web, Image, etc.) come from scraping in ways like this article describes.
Hopefully, Google will address these issues in its Custom Search API. If they
don't many people will still continue to scrape.

~~~
wslh
But the Google Custom Search API is a different thing. It's a search based on
a set of sites. What's important is to have an API to search for the "whole"
indexed Internet, and Google is the most advanced search engine in town. If
you play with more complex queries you quickly note the difference between
Google and Bing, Yahoo or Blekko.

~~~
landyman
Yes, which is what we thought too. But, you can setup a "custom search engine"
with some default site (we used www.google.com), then change the settings to
that it uses the entire web, and remove the site that you originally put in.

The Bing and Yahoo APIs are definitely a lot better, IMO. But, as long as
Google wants me to use their Custom Search API, then that's what I'll use.

------
klenwell
_If you go to Google and look at the html source code you’ll be astonished to
see pure Javascript obfuscated code._

If you turn off javascript on your browser, I'm pretty sure you get straight
html. That used to be the case anyway. Most scripts don't signal javascript-
support.

------
nl
The CSE API replaces it and provides a JSON based API:
<http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html>

------
ddemchuk
you can easily scrape google without having to use something as bulky as
htmlunit.

When I teach people how to scrape, exercise #1 is scraping Google with Ruby
Mechanize and Nokogiri. xPath is your friend

