Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Find the Largest Page

We all know about Feeling Lucky with Google. But how about Feeling Large?

Google sorts your search results by PageRank. Certainly makes sense. Sometimes, however, you may have a substantially different focus in mind and want things ordered in some other manner. Recency is one that comes to mind. Size is another.

In the same manner that Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button redirects you to the search result with the highest PageRank, this hack sends you directly to the largest (in kilobytes).

Tip

This hack works rather nicely in combination with repetition [Hack #15] .

The Code

Save the following code as a CGI script ["How to Run the Hacks” in the Preface] named goolarge.cgi in your web server’s cgi-bin directory. Be sure to replace insert key here with your Google API key.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# goolarge.cgi
# A take-off on "I'm Feeling Lucky," redirects the browser to the largest
# (size in K) document found in the first n results.  n is set by number
# of loops x 10 results per.
# goolarge.cgi is called as a CGI with form input
     
# Your Google API developer's key.
my $google_key='insert key here'; # Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file. my $google_wdsl = "./GoogleSearch.wsdl"; # Number of times to loop, retrieving 10 results at a time. my $loops = 10; use strict; use SOAP::Lite; use CGI qw/:standard/; # Display the query form. unless (param('query')) { print header( ), start_html("GooLarge"), h1("GooLarge"), start_form(-method=>'GET'), 'Query: ', textfield(-name=>'query'), ...