Running perl hack from “Yahoo! Directory Mindshare in Google”

Question

Has anyone run perl script given at http://oreilly.com/pub/h/974#code ?

This is a famous one, used to get URLs from Yahoo! directory and many people have successfully used it.

I was trying to get URLs. I created my own Google API key and replaced that in the code. Apart from that I did not make any change.

Script is neither producing any error nor any URL.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::LinkExtor;
use SOAP::Lite;

my $google_key  = "your API key goes here";
my $google_wdsl = "GoogleSearch.wsdl";
my $yahoo_dir   = shift || "/Computers_and_Internet/Data_Formats/XML_  _".
              "eXtensible_Markup_Language_/RSS/News_Aggregators/";

# download the Yahoo! directory.
my $data = get("http://dir.yahoo.com" . $yahoo_dir) or die $!;

# create our Google object.
my $google_search = SOAP::Lite->service("file:$google_wdsl");
my %urls; # where we keep our counts and titles.

# extract all the links and parse 'em.
HTML::LinkExtor->new(\&mindshare)->parse($data);

sub mindshare { # for each link we find...

  my ($tag, %attr) = @_;

  print "$tag\n";   

  # continue on only if the tag was a link,

  # and the URL matches Yahoo!'s redirectory.

  return if $tag ne 'a';   

  return unless $attr{href} =~ /srd.yahoo/;

  return unless $attr{href} =~ /\*http/;



  # now get our real URL.

  $attr{href} =~ /\*(http.*)/; my $url = $1;

  print "hi";

  # and process each URL through Google.

  my $results = $google_search->doGoogleSearch(

                      $google_key,"link:$url", 0, 1,

                      "true", "", "false", "", "", ""

                ); # wheee, that was easy, guvner.

  $urls{$url} = $results->{estimatedTotalResultsCount};

  print "1\n";

} 

# now sort and display.

my @sorted_urls = sort { $urls{$b} <=> $urls{$a} } keys %urls;

foreach my $url (@sorted_urls) { print "$urls{$url}: $url\n"; }

Program goes into the loop, and comes out at first iteration to "my @sorted_urls = sort { $urls{$b} <=> $urls{$a} } keys %urls;".

I don't have any understanding about perl but this task should have been trivial.

Surely,I am missing something very obvious, because this script has been successfully used by many.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Are you supplying a directory to the script? Because if you are not, and this line in your script

"/Computers_and_Internet/Data_Formats/XML_  _".
              "eXtensible_Markup_Language_/RSS/News_Aggregators/"

is not a formatting artefact, then you're trying to scrape a non-existent page.