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December 19, 2005

duckytool - search the web from a command line

Jose Nazario has released a new iteration of his "duckytool", a command line tool for searching the web. It encapsulates a bunch of web services APIs - Google, Amazon, del.icio.us, Yahoo, and quite a few others - into a simple tool callable from the shell, suitable for building into scripts or otherwise reusing in other ways. It's similar in spirit to yubnub.

Version 0.9.6 just released includes support for command line searches of the Ann Arbor District Library catalog, something that was easy for me to add in because of the AADL's support for RSS in their catalog. All told it was about 10 lines of code to add this in. (Yubnub has an "aadl" command that works the same way.)

If your library supports RSS for search results, this could be something you could do yourself based on this codebase (it's in Python). I'm hoping that some prototype built on this might make up a proof of concept for the library bot I wrote about a bit earlier.

Thanks to Jose for writing the vast bulk of this in such a way that little changes are easy to make.

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