Austin Ziegler wrote:
> 
> Very cool, James. Be warned, though, that Google frowns on "screen
> scraping", preferring people to use the SOAP API.

Yes, well that's one reason it is not linked from the main ruby-doc page.

I started of thinking I would just add a way to do a straight-up Google 
search, limited to the ruby-doc.org site, but was unhappy with the 
resulting page being, well, another site.

Framing the search results page seemed undesirable, so I thought about 
scrapping the results.  Curiously enough, while putting this page up on 
ruby-doc.org, I came across some old code that did actually use the 
Google API, but apparently some required files were lost in assorted 
site moves and upgrades.

Anyway, I though this was a neat enough demo of how easy it is to use 
Mechanize that I should share it. How the actual search page ends up is 
another matter. Time to go find my Google API key perhaps.

(Regarding Google frowning on scraping, I wondered if this was because 
of volume, which I expect would be low, or that it typically means 
omitting the sponsored ads.  I figured I would add to code to *keep* the 
sponsored ads in the resulting page, figuring that's part of Google's 
revenue model.  Maybe I can just keep the entire Google search results 
page, and simply insert a set of links to get back to ruby-doc.org. So 
many choices.)

James