February 2003
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
9h
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 4. Non-API Google Applications
Hacks #41-49
As you’ve seen so far in this book, amazing things can be done with Google data access without ever using the Google API. This section of the book deals with Google applications that scrape Google’s HTML to access its data rather than use the sanctioned Google API.
Scraping Versus the API
What is scraping and how is it different from using the Google API? Scraping is the act of using a program to pull information from an HTML page.
The Google API, on the other hand, allows you to query Google’s search data directly, instead of pulling information from saved HTML as the scrapers in this section do.
Why Scrape Google Data?
Why have Google scrapers in this book anyway? Can’t you do everything with the Google API? Alas, you can’t. The Google API is a great way to search Google’s main body of web pages, but it doesn’t go much further than that. It’s even limited in what it can pull from Google’s main web search. For example, the Google API can’t do a phonebook search. And it can’t access the data from Google News, Google Catalogs, or most of Google’s other specialty search properties.
That’s too bad, because cool things can be done with the data from those searches. Need to track news stories for a certain topic? It’s a lot easier to access several compiled searches from a spreadsheet than to manually scan HTML pages. Plus, once the information is loaded into a spreadsheet, you can resort and manipulate the data just about any way you please. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.