Way to extract Google Synonyms

Question

Would anyone know of a way to extract Google Synonyms, either through their API or other (TOS-approved) methods?

Specifically, Google have a function that allows you to type a tilde sign "~" in front of a word to conduct a search with synonyms.

As opposed to the search results, I'd like to extract the actual synonym data - so for ~cat, I would like a script that returns feline, kitten, etc.

http://www.synonymlab.com/ do something similar, I guess - but do they do this through the API?

Sorry but there's limited information out there. Any ideas if it's possible?

Answer 1

I looked around for a Google synonym API and found no evidence of such as service.

On the other hand, I found evidence that other people also looked and found nothing. :)

As alternatives, you might consider using WordNet, Freebase (see a discussion on synonyms), or Wikipedia (see Extracting Named Entities and Synonyms from Wikipedia).