Yahoo!'s REST API for search
I spend a significant amount of time trying to figure out how to connect business application users at my corporation to the data that they need about our products (both on the web and from our corporate databases). I came across this blog entry this past weekend and I really like what how they used Yahoo!'s REST API for searching Wikipedia. The example used in the blog was to do "a search for 'margaret thatcher' restricted to wikipedia.org and take the top result".
In the past we've actually put shortcuts in applications to go do Google Searches for product names and numbers, but we've never restricted the result set to the product's manufacturer's website. We've also never just gotten the top url back from Google and sent the business user to that URL, but I think we might give it a try. Apparently Google has this capability also, but the request would need to be a SOAP request and quite frankly I can't stand the overhead required in building SOAP requests and parsing through the gigantic XML data returned.
Until next time...Rich
In the past we've actually put shortcuts in applications to go do Google Searches for product names and numbers, but we've never restricted the result set to the product's manufacturer's website. We've also never just gotten the top url back from Google and sent the business user to that URL, but I think we might give it a try. Apparently Google has this capability also, but the request would need to be a SOAP request and quite frankly I can't stand the overhead required in building SOAP requests and parsing through the gigantic XML data returned.
Until next time...Rich
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