Connecting with the Adobe Community with Google Site Search

Posted by: Tom Duerig, Software Engineer

We love Google Site Search. And when working with our customers, we often discover new and interesting ways to apply our technologies to their business needs.

With Adobe's latest launch of Creative Suite 4, (which includes some of their most popular desktop applications, such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash), we had the chance to work with their team to integrate Google Site Search into their product in a way that truly blurs the line between off-line and online content.

Adobe is using Google Site Search as part of Creative Suite 4's Community Help to connect suite customers to Help content on and off Adobe.com, including tutorials, technical support, online product help, videos, articles, tips and techniques, blogs, examples and other resources.

In chatting with Adobe Product Manager, Mark Nichoson, we learned that Adobe chose Google Site Search for a variety of reasons. First, we learned that user experience and consistency are essential for Adobe customers. After several studies, the Adobe Creative Suite Team concluded that their customers would use Google Site Search to access information on their products.

At the same time, the nature of Adobe Community Help is to align, share and offer the best available information online. Google Site Search allowed this to happen by aggregating more than 4000 URLs coming from the active members of their customer base (bloggers, partners, developers, webmasters and others).

This is just one of the ways Google Site Search is connecting customers and their users with the information they need -- whether they're within their applications or on their websites. We can't wait to see what unique Site Search implementations come up next!

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Beefed-up developer guide

Posted by: Kevin Gargoyle Lim, Technical Writer

We've updated the developer guide to include the more advanced Custom Search features, such as synonym expansion and integration with Subscribed Links. These features let you trick out your search engine and give your users a richer search experience. Synonym expansion lets you expand a user's search term (such as "running") to include its variants (such as "jogging" and "sprinting"), so users will not need to search for each variant. Subscribed Links enables you to directly answer your users' questions by promoting a specific result at the top of the results page. You can create your own result text and define sets of queries that would trigger subscribed link results.

The developer guide may not be edge-of-your-seat material, but it does now come with a freebie glossary and a search gadget that you can add to your iGoogle page. We're still tinkering with the documentation and bulking it up with more juicy tips, so keep coming back to check our progress.

Happy reading!

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Delivering Custom Search to your applications

Posted by: Mark Lucovsky, Software Engineer

One of the most exciting things happening with our APIs is the clever use of Custom Search engines (CSEs), blended results, and innovative uses of UI components, resulting in rich user experiences. I'd like to highlight a few interesting applications that use the AJAX API with Custom Search, and then illustrate how Custom Search engines are accessed in the AJAX Search API. With a little effort, it is possible to get a very different search experience than the standard iframe version of CSE results to embed into your web site.

Over the last couple of weeks, users found interesting information about the U.S. elections and the party conventions at our 2008 U.S. Election page. In the center of the page, there's a page element based on the AJAX API that is designed to deliver a large amount of very specific election-related news and information in a very compact form factor. The tab labeled "Blog Posts" is simply a search on a specific CSE -- the CSE itself is simple, it covers a dozen or so well-read political blogs. This page element demonstrates the ability to deliver this in a very small form factor that's easy to place on any page. You can do a "view source" on the page and you will see what I mean. The AJAX Search API blog provides more details on how the elections page element, included below, was constructed.



Another good example is VisualDx Health. This site delivers health-related information through a very sophisticated CSE. Under the hood, it's a straightforward application that takes advantage of the underlying API. Multiple search requests are fired off in parallel to create this powerful categorized display of results. Rolling Stone takes a similar approach, but this site uses news in addition to multiple CSEs to create a segmented search experience to tailor the content to its specific audience.

Let's take a quick look at how CSEs are accessed using the AJAX Search API.

• Take a plain old web search URL like this


• http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=barack%20obama


• Add a new CGI arg called &cx to refer to an existing custom search engine


• http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=barack%20obama&cx=010222979794876194725:pqldevwuapa

Check the responses -- it's pretty easy. If you prefer using JavaScript objects, something like this also works:

var search = new google.search.WebSearch();
search.setSiteRestriction("010222979794876194725:pqldevwuapa");
search.execute("barack obama");

You can dig deeper to view how these applications are built. Using Firebug, you can also take a look at the "Net" tab to focus on the JS request/response stream while performing searches.

The AJAX API team is working to deliver Google services through a RESTful JSON/JSON-P based system, as well as the large collection of JavaScript classes and high level page elements that developers use to build these very clever sites. The combination of the AJAX APIs and CSEs is a pretty powerful system. Learn more by reviewing our documentation and posting questions/suggestions on our developer forum.

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