> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Park [mailto:]
> Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 3:09 PM
> To: 'Xml-Dev'
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Web Service Business Questions
>
>
> > > Yes, I can see a lot of use for having Google on the
> desktop. But
> > > how can web service-based Google application developers
> compete with
> > > HTML scrapping apps that doesn't have to pay Google any money?
> >
> > I couldn't really parse the question, but have you tried to
> > build anything interesting out of screenscraping? It sucks,
> > free results or otherwise. Paying some bucks for a regular
> > grammar is worth it.
>
> Yes, I have and screenscraping does indeed suck in general.
> HTML returned by Google is, however, fairly consistent and
> highly scrappable.
Because they make it so. If creating a less scrapable version of Google
was in their financial interest, trust me they would.
> Bill, I am not scorning Google nor web services. I just want
> to see if there are real and substantial business cases for
> web services using concrete examples like Google. So far, I
> have not heard anything that justifies the amount of hoopla
> over Google's SOAP API.
Here we are in agreement. Web Services make sense in many cases, however
the Google API showcases one of the situations where it makes the least
sense.
--
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