PHP-Scripts Blog » API

Create your own search engine using Alexa Web Search Platform

TDavid — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:58:42 +0000

Last night Alexa announced that they are opening up their entire database, including server services to developers in exchange for consumption fees. This means there is finally a database API that developers can tie into for commercial purposes with the fees clearly outlined. One of the things that appeals to me, which I’m sure other developers are already thinking about, is the possibility of being able to carve out your own specialized databases out of Alexa’s 5 billion documents.

They are only taking a limited number of developers during their beta test, so might want to hurry up and get over here and sign up: websearch.alexa.com

The documentation says they have some higher level example scripts, but no idea if that includes PHP examples or not. The central API is written in C.

I signed up last night and am waiting for an account rep to contact me, hopefully today. I will be writing more about this system after I learn more about what’s behind the curtain.

Virtual Earth API with commercial site using PHP

TDavid — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 23:05:26 +0000

Reference: Building your commercial Virtual Earth Website using PHP:

We have already seen some basic C# code behind ASP pages that proxy the search and advertising queries. However, being a web based control you are not limited to working solely with Microsoft on the server side. In this article, we will achieve the same result using PHP.

First off, the ViaVirtualEarth PHP example requires cURL [how to tell if cURL is installed]. I followed the instructions in the article to build my own example page (pictured below).

Script files required
http://virtualearth.msn.com/vems/VE_MapSearchControl.css
http://virtualearth.msn.com/vems/VE_MapSearchControl.js

Also see
Build Your Own Virtual Earth URL

Google Adwords API

TDavid — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:03:19 +0000

It’s called the APIlity Library and it allows interaction with the Google Adwords program:

The APIlity PHP Library provides an object-oriented way to easily access and manage the Google AdWords API from within PHP. This comes along with an abstraction from the SOAP and WSDL details.

Requirements (also from the sourceforge page):

APIlity works both with PHP4 and PHP5 and usually only requires the cURL extension to be installed. This can be done very easily by uncommenting the line

; extension=php_curl.dll
in your php.ini file, i.e. remove the semicolon at the beginning of the line. If you are using PHP4, you additionally need to enable the DOM/XML by uncommenting the line

; extension=php_domxml.dll

If you don’t manage your server or have (root) access to your php.ini file, then copy/paste the above requirements text and send to your hosting company’s support. They should be able to enable this for you or instruct how to get the proper web hosting plan that would provide this functionality.

References
How to tell if cURL is enabled
How to find the location of the php.ini file on the server where you website is hosted