Your Call to Action

This chapter discusses many ways to search for information ”some people are probably yawning at this very moment after several hours of good sleep. Search techniques aren't the most exciting topic, but it's an essential topic for Google users and Google Web Services developers. Locating a topic isn't hard. All you need is a good keyword. But unless you really like going through millions of hits, you need to find the most efficient way to locate just the information you want.

It's time to try a few of these techniques on your own. One way to try them out is to use the Google Advanced Search page at http://www.google.com/advanced_search. Unfortunately, this technique doesn't really tell you how the information will look from a developer perspective. With this in mind, you'll also want to test the sample applications in this book. See how they work with various keyword combinations. Remember to try the keywords in more than one order because Google respects keyword order as a means for determining which results to return. Make sure you try a few of the special searches as well ”including the filtering and restriction methods . It's also a good idea to try the various examples that come with the Google Web Services Kit.

Note  

As with the examples supplied in this book, the Google examples all include a string that you replace with the developer license you request from Google. For example, in the / GoogleAPI / soap-samples folder, many of the files contain this string: <key xsi:type= " xsd:string " >00000000000000000000000000000000</key> . Unfortunately, the instructions for using the Google examples don't always indicate this requirement, so you need to remember to make the change.

Some of the examples in this chapter expose the underlying XML you'll use to interact with Google Web Services. Chapter 3 goes on to the next step of working with Google Web Services ”actually using XML to perform tasks . Chapter 3 discusses how XML works, shows examples of how various languages use XML, and describes some of the problems you'll encounter when using XML. For example, XML isn't secure and it causes privacy issues you'll need to consider. This next step helps you move from merely using the Web service to telling it what information you'd like to request.