Does HTTP Really "Return" Data?

Create "synapse" by submitting URL to AltaVista: http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/addurl.htm

The form is simple:

<FORM method=GET action="http://add-url.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/newurl">
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=ad VALUE="1">
<INPUT name=q size=40 maxlength=1000 value="http://">
<INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE="Submit URL">
</FORM>

As before, we can concoct a new URL (to submit this page itself): http://add-url.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/newurl?ad=1& q=http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/perl/talk/webapi7.html

But we can write a special client to do that too. Using a GETURL utility (written in C, but many equivalents exist in perl), even a DOS batch file works:

@echo off
rem avsubmit.bat
geturl -split http://add-url.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/newurl?q=http://%1 | 
   egrep "(seconds)|(valid)" 
echo.

For example:

C:\>avsubmit www.sonic.net/~undoc/perl/talk/webapi7.html
The page was fetched in 0.068 seconds and will be indexed within a day or two.

Notice that the HTTP output is piped through egrep. Yes, it really does just return data which can be programmatically manipulated.

Further utilities can be built on top of AVSUBMIT.BAT. For example, the following submits www.amazon.com pages about O'Reilly books to AltaVista:

for %%f in (3243 2204) do call avsubmit "www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=156592%%f"

Sure enough, they show up in a day or two: http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=XX&q=learning+perl+win32+amazon&search.x=28&search.y=7

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