September 17, 2005
MSN Search API (part two)
Following up on the last entry...
MSN still has not put any documentation out there for the use of their new API, save for the Visual Studio SDK. I and a handful of others have taken it upon ourselves to work out the kinks and produce something for developer's to start working with.
What I've created is a very basic MSN Search tool, written in PHP that pulls its results through the MSN API. It's sort of a proof of concept thing that will provide you with the basics of how to construct your queries and retrieve the results.
Note that this first test run version also makes use of SOAP, or more specifically NuSOAP, to connect with the API. You'll need this installed as well, though you may already have it since Google's API also makes use of SOAP.
If you want to try it out for yourself, the working version is here. You'll also see it in the lefthand navigation block just below the Common Link tool.
To begin working with the code yourself, you'll want to grab the copy I've zipped up and placed here for download. It carries a GNU License as is normal for my tools.
There's info in the header of the script as to where you can get NuSOAP for free at SourceForge if you need it. Or, alternatively I've made the version I have installed here available in a zip file. You can grab that here if you would like.
As usual, I've commented the code so that hopefully you can tell what's going on everywhere. You shouldn't have any troubles with it, but if you do feel free to give a yell!
I'll be playing with it more as I can find the time, now that the hard lifting is done. Sorting out this first part, without any documentation at all, took me the better part of two days!