Google has become more than just a search engine as the result of their release of the Google API. Now developers can have seamless access many of Google’s functionality directly from within their applications to retrieve and integrate data which was formerly either unavailable or not readily accessible. We recently had a client who is a multi-national retailer with both a physical and Internet presence. The client needed a way to acquire certain business intelligence (BI) data from the Internet on a daily basis. After several unsuccessful attempts to create this functionality themselves, they came to us for a solution.

The Google API provides remote access to all of the search engine’s exposed functionality and provides a communication layer which is accessed via the “Simple Object Access Protocol” (SOAP), a web services standard. Since SOAP is an XML-based technology it is easily integrated into legacy web-enabled applications.