June 28, 2007
Google Custom Search on the Fly (just like searchfeedr....err?)
Just spotted this on the Google Custom Search Engine blog, which I haven't visited for a while:
You can now create a CSE by simply placing a small piece of tailored code on a page on your site. With that one piece of code, Google's search technology will automatically include in your new CSE all of the sites you have linked to from that page, creating a dynamic, powerful and tailored search experience really quickly. Moreover, your new CSE will update itself periodically to include any new links added to that page.
I experimented with something related to this as PageSearch, the context that originally gave me the inspiration for the idea of naturally occurring search hubs:
(Here's a link to the first time I wrote about it, I think: Rollyo Portable? PageLinks Search, on November 10th, 2005. Demos soon followed, of course... I also seem to remember mailing Rollyo about the idea at the time and got no reply. Are they in the deadpool yet, I wonder? Must check...;-)
The Google CSE goes a step further by allowing you to add links from pages to a growing search engine; in this way you can easily (effortlessly) build up a search engine that covers only and any sites you link to from a blog, for example.
I also experimented with ways of tuning the search, so users could drop particular domains from the search results:
(Another thing to mention about searchfeedr is that is lets you search over the pages that are linked to from a particular page, or the domains those pages live on. Searchfeedr also gives you the choice of which search engine you want to use...)
Today, the Google Custom Search folks opened up an Google on-the-fly custom search engine API that lets you define a "pagesearch" CSE via a URL.
I used a similar approach for searchfeedr - everything is handled via the URL, which makes writing bookmarklets easy and also means you can bookmark a particular search.
In addition to PageSearch, searchfeedr also demonstrated searches over the pages that linked to a particular page (linkSearch):
And of course, searchfeedr will also accept page URLs or domains as the search limits for a search via an RSS feed, originally prototyped as deliSearch:
Searchfeedr also attempts a bit of searchfeedr ESP when you send it a URL without specifying a link search, page search or RSS/feed-powered search.
More recently, I've started Pipe-ifying the searchfeedr backend: searchFeedr Pipes.
Come on Google - KEEP UP....
PS missed this in my quick skim of the most recent on-the-fly post:
You can use our makecse tool to generate CSEs from different sources of links:
* HTML: http://www.cs.berkeley/~russell/ai.html
* RSS: http://reddit.com/.rss
* ATOM: http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
* OPML: http://medicalconnectivity.com/gems/blogroll.opml
Ho hum... I knew I should have spent a bit more time on Searchfeedr... Posted by ajh59 at June 28, 2007 11:32 AM