Book Image

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!

By : Shu-Wai Chow
Book Image

PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!

By: Shu-Wai Chow

Overview of this book

A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two or more external online sources into an integrated experience. This book is your entryway to the world of mashups and Web 2.0. You will create PHP projects that grab data from one place on the Web, mix it up with relevant information from another place on the Web and present it in a single application. This book is made up of five real-world PHP projects. Each project begins with an overview of the technologies and protocols needed for the project, and then dives straight into the tools used and details of creating the project: Look up products on Amazon.Com from their code in the Internet UPC database A fully customized search engine with MSN Search and Yahoo! A personal video jukebox with YouTube and Last.FM Deliver real-time traffic incident data via SMS and the California Highway Patrol! Display pictures sourced from Flickr in Google maps All the mashup applications used in the book are built upon free tools and are thoroughly explained. You will find all the source code used to build the mashups used in this book in the code download section for this book.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Chapter 3. Make Your Own Search Engine

Project Overview

What

Using web services from Microsoft, and Yahoo!, build your own search engine.

Protocols Used

REST, SOAP

Data Formats

XML, SOAP

Tools Featured

SoapClient

APIs Used

Microsoft Live Search API, Yahoo! Web API

At this point, we have a little bit of mashup experience and have utilized two simple, but popular, web services protocols. We’re going to build on that knowledge in this chapter by creating a slightly more useful web application. We are also going to be introduced to SOAP, the third, and most complex of the currently fashionable web service protocols.

In this chapter, we are going to create our own search engine. In the past, this would require a massive amount of hardware resources, and complex search and spidering algorithms. Lucky for us, search engines like Google, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo! have already done this for us. Even luckier for us, these sites have released web services for us to query their data centers and retrieve results...