Steven Ng

For companies that want to use Google’s search on their websites, they can purchase a Google Mini Search Appliance starting at $1995. Google gives you many ways to integrate this into your site, but in this post I will explain the fastest way for a developer.

Okay let’s begin! One day your boss tells you he just bought a Google Mini (or two) and wants you to make it work with your existing website. “make it work” is a real-world project requirement for those of you who haven’t been blessed being a cubicle slave yet.

First step is to obviously log into your Google Mini which can be reached by an IP address. Once inside the Mini you will create an collection and name it something descriptive like “stevenng_mainsite”. Start off by clicking on Crawl and Index from the left menu. Then go to Crawl URLs In the first sections Start Crawling from the Following URLs: add the full URLs from your website you want to crawl like this “http://www.stevenng.net”. Next under Follow and Crawl Only URLs with the Following Patterns: add the matching URL pattern to crawl like this “stevenng.net/”. In the last section, enter patterns for itesm you DON’T want called.

You can select to schedule crawls or do a continous crawl, I won’t cover configuration and setup much in this tutorial as this post is geared more towards developers.

In the Serving section under Front Ends you have the option to modify some XSL to display the search results for your website. The XSL can be modified using Page Layout Helper which is a wizard like tool or if you want a more customized search results page then you can edit the XSLT stylesheet yourself. The XSLT file is commented very well which helps if you’re not too comfortable modifying XSLT.

Now that everything is fine and dandy on your Google Mini appliance, it’s time to tackle your website. So you know you have to create a Form with a text input and submit button for starters. You will aslo need to pass the following hidden form variables, see below for a sample snippet:

<form method="get" action="google.stevenng.net/search">
        <input type="text" name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value=""/>
        <input type="submit" name="btnG" value="Google Search"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="site" value="stevenng_mainsite"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="client" value="stevenng_resultpage"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="proxystylesheet" value="stevenng_resultpage"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="output" value="xml_no_dtd"/>
        <input type="hidden" name="num" value="10"/>
</form>

The site should be the collection you want to search, client and proxystylesheet is the name of your Frontend setup in the Google mini.