[...] A, and probably the biggest, internet search engine, reachable e.g. at http://google.com
See Fuzzy Google truth for an oracle that filters out how many pages Google found for a query.
For examples of use of the "Google Web API", see [L1 ]. Active discussion of the API is available through google.* netnews [L2 ].
[Anyone want to add info here about code to search google's comp.lang.tcl* newsgroups?]
[Anyone want to add info here about code to convert usenet message-id strings into google URLs?]
Use http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=$message_id (replacing $message_id with the usenet message-id of the post in question).
If you check http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html , you will see that there is a WSDL definition for google, allowing an application using SOAP to access the host. A Tcl example doing this would be wonderful - it could eliminate at least some cases of web scraping.