Pronounced “whiz-dill,” WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language, an XML format for describing web services. The most useful bit of the Google Web APIs Developer’s Kit is GoogleSearch.wsdl, a WSDL file describing the Google API’s available services, method names, and expected arguments to your programming language of choice.

For the most part, it’s easiest simply to keep the GoogleSearch.wsdl file in the same directory as the scripts you’re writing. This is, in most cases, assumed in the hacks in this book. If you prefer to keep it elsewhere, be sure to alter the path in the script at hand. A Perl hack usually specifies the location of the WSDL file like so:

...
# Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file
my $google_wdsl = "./GoogleSearch.wsdl";
...

I like to keep such files together in a library directory and so would make the following adjustment to the above code snippet:

...
# Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file
my $google_wdsl = "/home/me/lib/GoogleSearch.wsdl";
...