Jim Grandy wrote:
From: jgrandy
Subject: stupid Google game
Date: January 7, 2006 6:17:58 PM EST
Google for "unfortunately, yournamehere":
Lots of fun hits for "unfortunately, jim":
- unfortunately Jim’s orange dry suit made him look like a carrot
- Unfortunately Jim is no longer with us as he died of a brain tumor in 1993.
- Unfortunately, Jim did not respond. He disbelieved that it was an angel.
- Unfortunately, Jim is only one person with a limited amount of time available to
help Jane find answers to her questions.
I’ve turned this into a web page here.
I prototyped it with a screen scraper for Google, but I didn’t want to deploy a screen scraper.
Fortunately, Google has a Search API.
Unfortunately, Google’s API uses SOAP.
Fortunately, Ruby has a SOAP library.
Unfortunately, the Ruby SOAP library doesn’t work on Dreamhost.
Fortunately, the Yahoo Web Search API uses REST.
Unfortunately, Yahoo’s summaries don’t include enough right-hand context, so it’s harder to extract decent sentences from them.
Maybe I’ll go back to screen-scraping after all.
Update: Jim tells me he got the idea from Jorg Brown at Google.
Fun! Fortunately, with my name, many of the phrases found are actually lines from the book Fortunately, since the main character was named Ned. That book made a huge impression on me as a child, since there are not many books featuring Neds.