Re: Is the AJAX API the right thing for me to be using?

[Jeremy Geerdes]

I'm confused. What you describe sounds exactly like a robot. Even if we throw the similarities out, though, the AJAX API may not do what you want it to. The estimatedResultCount which it returns is notoriously unreliable. So if accuracy is even remotely important, you're out of luck there. I would suggest the Custom Search API, but it has a complimentary limit of 100 queries per day (i.e., it would take a while to run thousands of genes). You could enable payment on it, but even then you could only run a maximum of 10,000 queries per day, at a cost of USD 5 per 1,000 queries (or up to USD 50/day). And even then, I'm not certain how accurate the totalResults property is.

jg

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Nick Schurch <nicks...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm a scientist that works with artists and I'm making a digital art piece in which I hope to use the estimated number of google hits from a google search as a representative value for the relative quantity of available information about a given thing, in my case a gene. I need to do this for a lot (thousands) of genes, so my initial thought was to script this in python and just get the 'estimatedResultCount' from the returned json data for each one. I know the AJAX API will work for getting the information, but I'm a bit worried that this may be classed as a robot and thus be against the TOS. Is this even the right tool for me to be using to get this information? I understand that the AJAX APi is being depreciated; is there a more up-to-date way for me to get this estimated count for thousands of queries?

Nick

--
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Google AJAX APIs" group.
To post to this group, send email to
google-ajax...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
google-ajax-searc...@googlegroups.com
To view this message on the web, visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-ajax-search-api/-/_ObuN4C3HdMJ
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/google-ajax-search-api?hl=en?hl=en
 
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google AJAX APIs" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-ajax-searc...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--
Jeremy R. Geerdes

Generally Cool Guy

Des Moines, IA

If you're in the Des Moines, IA, area, check out Debra Heights Wesleyan Church!

http://www.debraheightswesleyan.org

[Nick Schurch]

It does sound quite a lot like a robot (albeit a harmless one). I guess the technicality is that the search terms have been defined by a user and will be displayed to the user as per the TOS, but that might be stretching it a bit...

Accuracy is not really what I'm after here; its art so I'm just after a vague measure of how many results there are for one gene vs another. For example, BRCA2 (one of the best studies important cancer genes) returns "About 1,060,000 results" in a google search where as GJB2 (a far less well studies gene) returns "About 110,000 results".

I've looked at the custom search app but I have no idea how to script this in python, let alone to get it to search the whole web. The documentation seems pretty lacking. Maybe someone knows of a good example script?