Work API Teaser III – Google API

Here’s an example of implementing an API with many different endpoints. It’s the Google AJAX Search API which lets you access all of Google’s search engines programmatically! A few notes:

• In the Javascript API Google provides “branding” functions to make sure search results are properly attributed. There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding AJAX call — that is, it’s probably implemented directly in the Javascript — but I’d still like to provide a corresponding function. It would be nice if API providers actually gave a branding end-point
• The code doesn’t support (yet) multi-page results: coming soon
• The clever bit is in _item_path, which describes how to pull WORK result objects out of the AJAX result
• all this code is actually available right now, via SVN: the instructions are here. This library is standalone (and is in fact the basis for many of the other projects I have on Google code)
• The Google API requires a _http_referer: the URL of the site that’s using the results
• The Google API does not require an API key, but you can pass one (in the constructor or in individual search calls) under the key api_key. You can use the same API key that you’ve created for Google Maps.

Here’s the Google API class: quite simple. I’ll probably extend each individual search function to provide all the known parameters by name, rather than passing in a **ad catch-all.

class Google(bm_api.API):
    _base_query = {
        "v" : "1.0",
    }

    _item_path = "responseData.results"
    _meta_path = "responseData.cursor"
    _convert2work = bm_work.JSON2WORK()

    def __init__(self, _http_referer, **ad):
        bm_api.API.__init__(self, _http_referer = _http_referer, **ad)

    def WebSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def LocalSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/local"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def VideoSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/video"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def BlogSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/blogs"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def NewsSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/news"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def BookSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/books"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def ImageSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/images"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

    def PatentSearch(self, q, **ad):
        self._uri_base = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/patentNew"
        self.SearchOn(q = q, **ad)

Here’s how you use it:

api_key = os.environ["GMAPS_APIKEY"]
referer = "http://code.davidjanes.com"
query = "Paris Hilton"

api = Google(key = api_key, _http_referer = referer)
api.VideoSearch(query)

for item in api.IterItems():
    pprint.pprint(item)

Here’s an example of a results, searching for “Paris Hilton” in Videos. I tried searching in Patents without luck.

{'@Index': 0,
 '@Page': 1,
 u'GsearchResultClass': u'GvideoSearch',
 u'content': u"Paris Hilton's new video clip for 'Nothing In This World'",
 u'duration': u'204',
 u'playUrl': u'http://www.youtube.com/v/...',
 u'published': u'Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:33:23 PDT',
 u'publisher': u'www.youtube.com',
 u'rating': u'4.52872',
 u'tbHeight': u'240',
 u'tbUrl': u'http://0.gvt0.com/vi/Ki2M3-2W-cQ/0.jpg',
 u'tbWidth': u'320',
 u'title': u'Paris Hilton - Nothing In This World',
 u'titleNoFormatting': u'Paris Hilton - Nothing In This World',
 u'url': u'http://www.google.com/url?q=...',
 u'videoType': u'YouTube'}