Google Hacks

Programming the Google Web API with Perl

A simple script illustrating the basics of programming the Google Web API with Perl and laying the groundwork for the lion’s share of hacks to come.

The vast majority of hacks in this book are written in Perl. While the specifics vary from hack to hack, much of the busy work of querying the Google API and looping over the results remain essentially the same. This hack is utterly basic, providing a foundation on which to build more complex and interesting applications. If you haven’t done anything of the sort before, this hack is a good starting point for experimentation. It simply submits a query to Google and prints out the results.

The Code

#!/usr/local/bin/perl # googly.pl # A typical Google Web API Perl script # Usage: perl googly.pl <query> # Your Google API developer's key my $google_key='insert key here'; # Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file my $google_wdsl = "./GoogleSearch.wsdl"; use strict; # Use the SOAP::Lite Perl module use SOAP::Lite; # Take the query from the command-line my $query = shift @ARGV or die "Usage: perl googly.pl <query>\n"; # Create a new SOAP::Lite instance, feeding it GoogleSearch.wsdl my $google_search = SOAP::Lite->service("file:$google_wdsl"); # Query Google my $results = $google_search -> doGoogleSearch( $google_key, $query, 0, 10, "false", "", "false", "", "latin1", "latin1" ); # No results? @{$results->{resultElements}} or exit; # Loop through the results foreach my $result (@{$results->{resultElements}}) ...