Using the google-custom-search for educational purpose - google-custom-search

Is there any access to the "google-custom-search" for students?
It is for a thesis. I want to implement/use the "normalized google distance" for my dataset. Unfortunately, my university has no general agreement with google.
PS. yes I know I could simply parse the web-page. But it seems to be a bit lame if there is an api for that.

Google discontinued the only paid option of the Custom Search Engine (CSE), so now your only option is 'free' -- in return for seeing a few content-based ads in your custom search results.
The 'pro' option now is the json/atom Search API, also free up to 100 queries per day.
I highly recommend that "anyone who ever uses a search engine", check them both out. It takes minutes to create a custom search - and after that there are countless optional ways to customize or integrate with other (free) tools like Analytics or Sheets/Slides/Forms/etc. If your CSE gets popular enough, they'll start paying you.
Google has a lot of 'products' that many people aren't aware of (most with free options) that.
Side note, since you're a class - Microsoft has some pretty sweet deals for anyone student/teacher with an email address on a school domain ($1000's in free software.)

Related

Google Books API Branding Compliance issue--infoLink returns "Not found" page

I'm working with the Google Books API and the Branding Guidelines state that I have to have a prominent link to the Google Books page for each search result. Cool, I'm fine with that.
However:
saleInfo.buyLink isn't always there in the API response
volumeInfo.infoLink and volumeInfo.canonicalVolumeLink sometimes often go to a "Not Found" page (for example this page, which is supposed to have information for "Lunar Orbiter State Estimation Using Neural Network-based Crater Detection" by Lena Marie Downs [don't ask, I used faker to call the API with random keywords and picked a random result])
So my question becomes, is it my responsibility to try to find workarounds for any of that, in order to be compliant? Or should I just go with what Google Books gives me and call it a day?
I changed my seeds file to only look for Google Books that have an ebook available with &filter=ebooks, and I haven't run into these issues with what it found this time. But I guess the question still stands whether it's up to developers using the API to provide for Google's issues, in case anyone else wants to answer.

How To Get Started Working with the Google AdWords API?

I'm a student working on a project related to SEO; I need to write an optimization tool, so I'm writing an application using C# and Windows Forms. The main part of the application is for keyword selection, and I want to use the Google AdWords API to obtain a list of keywords.
I downloaded the C# client library, but can't understand how to set up the project: I am getting the error:
"An API exception has occurred. See ApiExecption and InnerException fields for more details".
Maybe I have made a mistake when I edited the App.config file as I haven't changed anything else. Can anyone advise me where I should begin? I would be grateful to hear your ideas.
Unfortunatley, the AdWords API isn't as open as you might think: It's meant for ad agencies managing large accounts, or software vendors who want to build ad management platforms. You need to apply to Google for an API key to gain access; they used to give them out to nearly anyone with an account, and it took about 14 days to process the application. However, Google has got very strict about their terms and conditions over the past 12 months, and to put it simply, you probably won't meet them if you're building an SEO tool; even if you apply to build a full platform, you'll need to wait six to ten weeks for approval as they've got a huge backlog of applications to process at the moment.
As this is just a student project, you should actually be able to get away with just using the AdWords API sandbox, which is open to anyone with a Google account. This won't give you real keywords or stats, but would demonstrate your understanding of the platform.
Another option would be to check out the Ad Intelligence Service of the adCenter API; you'd still need to open an adCenter account (with a $5 activation fee), but you should be able to get an adCenter API key without waiting too long. The stats available from Microsoft won't be as extensive as what Google has to offer, but will still be relevant to the at least the US market. Also, being Microsoft, they've got a good range of C# examples.
You could use the sandbox, but it is good only for testing purposes. You won't get real values for traffic estimation and keyword ideas.
To use the sandbox, what you need is a Google account (your gmail account for instance). To initialize the sandbox,
In your App.config, put email/password/developerToken as your email / your password / youremail++USD (e.g. john.doe#gmail.com++USD)
Run the GetCampaigns.cs code example. It is under v201109/BasicOperations folder in the C# examples project. This will initialize the sandbox.
Run the GetAccountHierarchy.cs code example. It is under v201109/AccountManagement folder. This will give you 5 client emails and their customer ids.
Use one of these customerIds in the ClientCustomerId field of App.config.
Run any other code example.
The video is a bit outdated, due to recent changes in AdWords API, I need to update it.
you can find a very good article series about adwords api there: Google Adwords API
it is not that hard to learn how to use it! I think the API itself is very good documented and there is a good suppo from google.

Alternative to the deprecated google REST web search API

I have been using the Google Websearch API for over 1 year now. The service was deprecated in Nov 2010 but continues to provide results to date. More recently, google has started to enforce the 1,000 queries (?) per day limit on this deprecated service. I swear, last month I made over 10,000 API calls in one day without any errors from the service (same IP, same API key).
So I guess my question is has anyone found an alternative yet? I know yahoo boss is pretty good but I am working exclusively on Google for my projects. I do not mind spending money for for this service either as long as i can get 64 results from Google.
On that thought, how are services like Zoomrank able to bypass all Google limits? I have a subscription with Zoomrank and I can get daily rankings for all my keywords. Do they have a tie-up with Google or are they just accessing some secret service I don't know about.
Some people have suggested the new Google custom search, but i dont know how does that help me search the web? Google CS is limited to the CSE you create and searches within those engines. If I am looking for web results for Pizza, Google CS doesnt help me.
Thanks for your input. Much appreciated
UPDATE: #ggez44 points to some official Google documentation of the solution described below here: http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1210656
You can use the Google Custom Search Engine to search the entire web.
In brief:
Create a CSE that searches a single site (e.g. google.com)
In the CSE control panel's Basics section, set to "Search the entire web but emphasize certain sites"
In the Sites section, delete the single site that you added when you created the CSE
Full details here:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/customsearch/thread?tid=56c0bd92dda351b7&hl=en&fid=56c0bd92dda351b7000495e3f500d83f
Once that's implemented, you can enable billing in the Google API Console at a CPM of $5, to a total of 10,000 queries.
Google API Console: https://code.google.com/apis/console/
Pricing: https://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html#Pricing

Build a search-based-app using an API from a major search engine: google, bing, yahoo - who offers search API?

I need to provide search functionality as the cornerstone of my app (basically I think I can make a better interface than whats is offered by Google, bing, yahoo - bold claim I know). Therefore I will not build an entire search engine from scratch, I will rather use an API provider by a major search engine and simply modify the interface that present the results to my visitors. I am a Google fanboi and I initially tried to use Google Search AJAX API. However, I was very disappointed since I can barely change anything at all.
Specifically;
I need an API that will let me pull programmatically the results from a major search engine and let me output them with the style and goodies that I want.
I am not looking to alter the order in which the search results are presented to the user by inserting crap in between the good results (this is against my philosophy). But I would like to wrap massive php/javascript around each search results so that I can completely control how each result is graphically rendered.
I heard of the BING API 2.0, would that be more flexible than Google AJAX API? Could anyone provide output if any of the current search providers are offering API for this purpose right now?
After careful investigation it appears to me that the Bing 2.0 API is the most flexible and robust search API currently on the market.
The Bing API does require you to put their ads next to the results. You can place your own ads with the Yahoo API. The Yahoo API uses the same search technology (same results) and can be used starting from $0,40 per 1000 queries. The lowest, bulk price of the Google API is $4,00 per 1000 queries. Google's relevance is easily ten times higher for the somewhat more advanced queries.
And also Bing version 2 search API is free!
Whereas, Yahoo BOSS V2 has pricing and so Google does custom search API.

Are there any websites providing free news, weather, photos APIs for using this data commercially

I want to build a service which needs to get this data from some source for further analysis. Does Google, Yahoo or someone else provides free access to this data for use in other websites using some API. I think Twitter does something like this for their data although they enforce some limits on this. The data I need is mostly for US and Canada.
Thanks,
Gary
You can find a bunch of free web services here: http://www.webservicex.net/
If you can stand the ads, you can also check here: http://www.webservicelist.com/