(May 3, 2002) - When Dave Spencer and his colleagues at Santa Monica, California-based Lumos Technologies heard that Google had released its SOAP API, their first thought was to wonder how best to incorporate the Google search engine into Instant Messenger - on which they all, like many enterprises these days, live during business hours.

The result, YIM Google, is a bot on Yahoo IM written in Java...that searches Google for you. You just send it the words you want to search on and it calls www.google.com and returns 5 results from them.

"It's probably easy to get this to work in other environments like AOL's AIM, or in Jabber," Spencer tells JDJ News Desk.

The joy of hooking IM and Google up in this way is of course that the search will be returned to you regardless of where we happen to be since IM is location transparent. "Anyone can try it," says Spencer, "You just send an IM message over Yahoo to the entity/bot named: yimgoogle."

Spencer's next goal is to hook up his work-site insider.lumos.com to the search engine they use (Lucene, pure Java). Meantime, he adds, some description of the YIMGoogle bot, a screenshot, and a diagram can be seen at: http://www.tropo.com/techno/java/yimgoogle/