Google and Dojo, Sitting in a tree…

Posted by Shane O'Sullivan on 1 May, 2008

I’ve submitted a bunch of new data stores to the Dojo Ajax Toolkit that make it simple to search Google directly from your own site (ticket here).

Update: I’ve also submitted a store to read any Atom or RSS feed, anywhere, without any server redirects. See Google And Dojo, F.E.E.D.I.N.G

This is different from putting a search box on your site and redirecting to Google. With the new dojox.data.GoogleSearchStore family of data stores, you can retrieve google search results in JSON format, and display them on your site directly.

Pause a second…. let it sink in…..

There are no cross domain issues, and no server side component is required. It uses the dojo.io.script transport to access the Google Ajax API service. Just stick the following on your page:

<div dojoType=”dojox.data.GoogleWebSearchStore” jsID=”googleStore”></div>

and you have Google’s millions of servers at your fingertips.

The following data stores are available:

GoogleWebSearchStore - does a standard web search.
GoogleBlogSearchStore - searches blogs. A future enhancement I will be writing will be to write a data store that accesses Google’s extremely cool Ajax Feed API, which provides access to any ATOM feed, anywhere, in JSON. It’ll be possible to do a full web search of all blogs for certain topics, then using the feed store to pull down that complete feed .
GoogleLocalSearchStore - searches the Google Local service to find places, businesses etc.
GoogleVideoSearchStore - Does what it says on the tin, searches for videos.
GoogleNewsSearchStore - Finds news stories…. noticing a pattern yet?
GoogleBookSearchStore - Um, finds books..
GoogleImageSearchStore - Finds images. This provides both a thumbnail and full sized version, similar to the FlickrRestStore already provided by Dojo.

The potential applications are more or less infinite. Demos included in the check-in show how to integrate this with the extremely cool dojox.dtl templating engine to display the results in a number of different ways, as well as how to feed the results into the Dojo Grid, Gallery and SlideShow.

This code is included in the nightly checkouts of Dojo, and not in v1.1. To get it, either check it out from source control, or get it from http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/.

Have a look at the simplistic demo of it in action at http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dojox/data/demos/demo_GoogleSearchStore.html (available from the May 1st nightlies).

A big thank you to Google for making this service available. Now go play!

P.S. Stay tuned for the Yahoo variant, coming soon!

This entry was posted on 1 May, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Ajax, Atom, Dojo, Javascript, Technical, dojo.data, dojox, json, open source. Tagged: Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.