"Error: HTTP Error: Unsupported HTTP response status 502 Bad Gateway (soapclient->response has contents of the response)
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: gquery() in /htdocs/ddotodott.com/gwc/functions.inc.php on line 36"

FindForward is slower because it's searching 400 results. The Google Wildcard Search Site seems to be searching only the first 10.

What I might do is screenscrape 100 results a time, using the num=100 parameter on a Google web search. That would mean loading only 4 pages, not 40 as I do with the Google API (which is restricted to 10 results a time, IIRC).

I like that most of the (popular) queries are adult-related.

Screen-scraping is less robust in the face of change, when Google tweaks the layout of their results page. You'll be opening yourself up to a maintenance headache if you screen-scrape.

Why not just drop your searches from 400 results to 100? Or make it user-configurable?

Good idea. Changed to 100!

Good find! I completely forgot about Google wildcard searches, and this was a fun implementation.

I've often found the Google API to be quite unreliable when it comes to getting responses. At one point I had 50% of queries coming back as errors – making it difficult to provide a robust service.

On top of that I find the quotas limiting. I appreciate why they are in place, but some great mashups could be produced from just a few more queries.

Still, we do what we can :>

> At one point I had 50% of queries coming back as errors

Same here. This blog's search runs on it, and often you need to search twice, with the exact same query, to return any results.

As for quotas, you can ask them for more... and you might get more...