When Google decided to give developers access to their search (spelling and caching as well) services, people got really excited. That excitement waned somewhat when they realised that the API was only available in SOAP. This format is a powerful web-service language, and many have argued that Google could have done just as good a job, with much less overhead, if they had made their API available as a URI (direct URL request) based service.

Under this model, all required information would be passed as part of the requested address and then the page served would contain the results. People argued that basic XML would be a simpler, better format to return the results in, and that the complex SOAP system was unnecessarily powerful for this particular service.

I heard those ideas. XooMLe was born. XooMLe is just that, giving you the ability to query Google and get your results in basic XML (or plain-text for spelling suggestions and the complete page for cached pages). Check out the documentation for more information, or try out a browser-based search to have a look.

Download   XooMLe (44.8 KiB, 7,921 hits)

You can finally download your own copy of XooMLe and install it on your server, reducing the amount of time it takes to perform a search and making your XooMLe/Google-based application more stable in the process.

To run XooMLe on your own server, you will need to be running PHP, although you don’t have to interface with it using PHP, since the results and requests are XML-based and URL-based respectively.

WARNING: The online version of XooMLe is provided as a hosted service for experimentation and perhaps small site-searches only! You should NOT rely on XooMLe being available as the backend of your company’s search engine! If you want something more reliable, you should download and install XooMLe on your own server.