Joe Gregorio
I mentioned a while a ago that I thought Atom would be a good format for search results. I also mentioned in the past that I thought SOAP was overkill for the Google API and that a REST based alternative would offer many advantages, either in the form that Paul Prescod proposed, or in the formulation I had put forward.
Well, that's all fine and good for theory. Here is the practice. Introducing the Google2Atom gateway. This service allows you to do simple GET queries on Google and to get the results formatted as an Atom feed. Note that I used Paul's formulation with the Google key being passed in via the URI. This has the advantage that you can take the resulting URI and do cool things with it, for example, plug it into your aggregator.
Update: To make it easier to experiment with the interface the Google Key is no longer required, if you do not supply it then the script will use my key. In addition a longer description of the service has been added, including the fact that the gateway takes the HTML returned by the GooleAPI and uses pyTidy to transform it into well-formed XHMTL for inclusion in the Atom feed.