MixedContent

Of all the interesting things announced at Google press day, I’m particularly taken with their new “subscribed links” (thx Boris). The idea is that you can easily plug in extra services to Google’s search, and the results of these extra services are displayed at the top of other search results when presented to the user. Straight from the horses mouth:

With the Google Subscribed Links API, you can add your services directly into Google search. This can help make those services more accessible, giving your users another entry-point to them when they’re making a related search on Google. There are a number of special features built in to Google search, such as currency conversion and movie showtimes, and you can add your service to that list with subscribed links. The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills.

I went through and made a couple of quick “hello world” type examples, and it all seemed to work great. Then I thought I would move on to something a bit harder and try and tie into the 43 Things API. I thought it would be neat to make it so when I would google for someone’s name, if they had an account in the 43 universe, I would see their 43x information shown along side the standard search results.

But then I realized that the XML DataObjects that Google uses as a data source can’t be created dynamically on the fly (which I guess makes sense for performance reasons). Google caches the xml data, and crawls it every 10 minutes or so. If you don’t change the timestamp on your XML data file, the new results don’t appear to be crawled again. But since creating an XML file of every user on 43things was out of scope for my lunchtime hackery, I called uncle.

Does anyone else have an easier way of tying in Google’s subscribed links to external API’s? I guess the only real way is to create a cached file of relevant data and have it updated hourly (or something).