CapeMail - Asynchronous Google Access or Google by Email

10 May 2003

Google recently published its Web Services interface at http://www.google.com/apis (tech explanation). We've built an email interface to Google. Actually, the folks in Marketing built it, which says a lot about the simplicity of Web services. Just email google@capeclear.com and put the text of your query in the "Subject" line. You'll receive your search results via email.

It's not going to take the world by storm, but maybe it'll kick start some thought processes on the power of Web Services. It might be useful for PDAs, mobile phones, offline laptop users, and generally people who have infrequent, low quality access to the Internet. Some people may find it easier to use email rather than launch a browser, or maybe you could just use it to remind yourself to do something on the Internet...

There are some interesting queries that you can do on google, that transfer nicely to CapeMail. One trick is to do the query "site:www.capeclear.com ceo" to find out Cape Clear's CEO. Send this query to CapeMail - and find out who our CEO is...

International: Are your French, Dutch, Russian or outside the general '.com' arena? To see sites in just your region, append the text "site:.XX" to the end of your subject query, where XX is your domain of interest. For example to see all occurences of CapeClear in Denmark do the following query: CapeClear site:.dk, for a similar query on French Websites try this

Shortcut: More useful is the following idea: Store this link on your desktop. (How?: hover over this link, right mouse click->'Copy Shortcut', then on your Windows desktop, right mouse click->'Paste Shortcut'). A handy shortcut for CapeMail access.