Fortunately

Posted by oliver
Tue, 01/31/2006 - 22:45

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.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://osteele.com/trackback/106

Comments

Ned Batchelder - Wed, 02/01/2006 - 00:22

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.