mediajunk

Comments

9 comments

Eric G / July 18, 2003 4:05 PM / #

Doesn't Google limit the number of times you can use the API in any given day? That's probably one of the reasons nobody has put any serious investment into finding good uses for it. Also, the API is not available for use the Google Appliance, so people are developing for use with that either.

michael heraghty / July 18, 2003 9:29 PM / #

Good point about queries limit Eric. You can only use the APIs to query Google up to a max. of 1,000 times a day.

The official reason for the limit is because: "The Google Web APIs service is an experimental free program, so the resources available to support the program are limited."

Hope all is well in ... Atlanta? Or is it NYC?

Steve / July 25, 2003 5:34 AM / #

The 1000 query limit is a bummer. Not as good as Amazon's which is free unlimited (of course, they have something to sell). Better than eBay, which charges thousands of dollars to use their APIs.

After the 1000 daily limit is used up, I just send the request straight to Google along with the random word. Not optimal, but the simple concept still works.

I've had the couple minutes of fun type of feedback, but I've also had people who found really useful stuff they wouldn't have found until the x thousandth page of results. Of course you can always type in your own random word into Google...

michael heraghty / July 25, 2003 12:47 PM / #

Hi Steve,

Sorry if I seemed to be unfair to bananaslug; it's just that I've seen one too many gimmicks at this stage (and the name "bananaslug" makes it seem like a fun brand, rather than a serious one ... a problem I can relate to, with the name "mediajunk"!).

Have you thought of coming up with suggestions for seed-words? Perhaps, rather than choosing completely random seeds, you could try to find genuine ways of honing the user's search?

This would perhaps implement a suggestion that usability company 37signals have been touting for a while.

Steve / July 25, 2003 3:56 PM / #

The 37signals proposal looks like a good idea. It probably wouldn't be *too* hard to prototype it with the google APIs. When the Google programming contest first came out, I wrote a connection between Google and WordNet (the functioning database of the English language). Something like that could back up a 27signals-like system. But I've already spent my spare programming cycles for the season...

I originally was calling what I did "GoogleSeed" but I didn't want to run afoul of Google trademarks (not that sites like googlism.com don't). Being an alum of UC Santa Cruz, I had bananaslug.com registered forever but hadn't used it, so when I needed a place to park the site, I pulled it out of the drawer. You're right about the connotation of whimsy... but let's see: "yahoo!", "google"?

And I admit, it is mostly for fun. But I like your idea of choosing more relevant seed classes to fetch more focused but still down-the-list results.

michael heraghty / July 25, 2003 4:30 PM / #

Hehe ... yeah, you're right Steve, web names tend to be on the goofy side. It was even sillier back in the "dotcom goldrush era". (e.g. Boo.com -- what were they thinking? Headline writers were rubbing their hands with glee when that one nosedived.)

You're right to steer clear of the Google trademark though. As I mentioned in another post, Google are taking legal action to ban verbalisations such as "Googling" and "Googled".

!!!

Googler / October 4, 2003 9:41 AM / #

Here's a useful site:

http://www.googlealert.com/

Tracks a web search for your automatically and emails when there are new results. This lets you watch the web for new content on a subject.

Michael Heraghty / October 4, 2003 12:16 PM / #

While GoogleAlert may seem like a good idea, I don't know many people who actually use it. The thought of getting an email every time a new item appears in Google's results for a particular search gives me a shudder ... it would soon *feel* like SPAM, I think.

Google's results are now updated almost every day. I still prefer to manually perform searches on subjects that interest me...

Jack / January 21, 2004 3:25 AM / #

We put out a Google keyword ranking tracker about 4 months ago. Already it's up to 5,000 users tracking almost 100,000 keywords:

I would guess it's one of the largest single projects to utilize the Google API (it's completely free of course)...

Keyword Tracker