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Curiousity turned into "checking a few things out", which turned into "examining a few SOAP implementations", which turned into "running a few experiments", which turned into "writing a program or two", which turned into... "an all-nighter"! (The programmers among you should be failiar with this phenomena! ;) ) The end result was a collection of nifty Google Tools written in Visual Basic, one of which is detailed below.
The Visual Basic Google Rank Check program has the following features:
> Supports many versions of Windows (all the way back to Win95 OSR2!)
> Does not require Visual Studios .NET (even works with old VB5!)
> Does not require you to install a bunch of XML drivers and Toolkits
> Does not require a PERL or JAVA interpreter to run
> Not limited to only first 10 results, does high speed "auto-scan" to any desired search depth, up to the API maximum of 1,000 results!
> Auto-halts deep scans as soon as your page is found (avoids wasting precious API daily search limits!)
> Displays interim results and status during deep scans.
> Traps and reports SOAP-based Google API Server Errors.
> Easy to Use
For the VB programmers among you, following are full instructions and source code! To use this you need to be 1) familiar with Visual Basic programming, and 2) have signed-up for the Google API and gotten your own "key".
SOAPing-Up Your PC:
As the Google API uses SOAP/XML to communicate with their server, the first thing you need is some way of accessing SOAP from Visual Basic without needing .NET! I looked at several different packages, some were designed primarily for non-VB environments (like SOAPLite); and some were just too convoluted, required other software to run, or buggy (like Microsoft). I finally settled on PocketSOAP.
I choose it because a) it was originally written for the PocketPC, so it is compact and efficient, b) it is fully self-contained, no extra XML drivers required, c) is supports various versions of Windows, including older ones, d) it works well with Visual Basic, and e) it's free!
Installing PocketSOAP was easy. If you are running Windows ME, 2000 or XP, just download [pocketsoap.com] (small, < 1mb) and install!
(If you are running an old version of Windows (95/98/NT), you first need to upgrade to a new version of the Windows Installer program, which you can get for either Win 95/98 [pocketsoap.com] or for NT [pocketsoap.com], then you can download and install PocketSOAP)
That's it! Your PC now has SOAP/XML support!
NEXT STEP - "THE FORM"
biggles, if someone is willing to pay a little money to search us, we much more amenable to talking.
Googleguy - great to hear that. Are you talking about software vendors like WPG paying you or is there an option for WPG end-users?
The only drawback to .NET is that the platform the executable runs on must have the .NET framework installed. This is about a 20 Meg download (free from the Windows Update or Microsoft web sites). If you are downloaded from a modem, it might take a while. It includes command line VB.NET and C# compilers.
