Google APIs: No SOAP key? No problem.
So, as one of the maintainers (using that term somewhat loosely as I haven’t touched a significant amount of code in there for quite sometime) of Supybot, I’ve heard a lot of complaining about the inability to get new SOAP search API keys. Though there are (were?) some ways around this, by and large most folks who have wanted to use our Google plugin but don’t already have a SOAP search API key were basically out of luck.
To wit, I did write a Yahoo search plugin that people have used and like using. Thankfully they actually actively embrace Python programmers using their APIs and just provide a nice RESTful way of doing things without any domain specific junk. It’s really quite a good plugin and a fairly good search engine and I encourage Supybot users to use it if they don’t have a Google SOAP key.
However, that said, people still want their Google. Unfortunately simply “updating” the Supybot Google plugin isn’t as simple as transliterating things from one API to the other, you see. Instead of providing a nice API like Yahoo did, Google replaced the SOAP API with an AJAX one. That’s fantastic for embedding search boxes on web pages and for ease of rolling out updates (just update the script that everyone’s <script> element points to), but really crappy for the IRC bot plugin authors! Fortunately, behind the scenes of the nasty obfuscated JavaScript there is a RESTful service as well, and it too (like Yahoo’s) returns a JSON-formatted resultset (with a catch that I’ll get to later).
So, what to do if you want to use this nice (invisible to most) service? Here’s the skinny.
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