By mdf-1 on

Is to possible to integrate Google Search Appliance with Drupal created website. Please suggest.
Thanks,
mdf

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

jvandyk’s picture

jvandyk commented

Please clarify your question. The GSA can crawl any website, including Drupal sites. The search form for the GSA can be served by any website, including Drupal sites.

mdf-1’s picture

mdf-1 commented

Thanks a lot for the reply.
My doubt is if I have a GSA to crawl my site and the indexing is done, how we can set up the search result for my site result from that indexed content. Is there any additional modules or new functioanlities are required for this ?? Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks,
mdf

jvandyk’s picture

jvandyk commented

Read the GSA documentation. It will tell you how to construct HTML for the search form that will search GSA for information on your site. Then add the HTML to your site (in your theme, for example).

In short, this is not a Drupal issue.

jp.stacey’s picture

jp.stacey commented

That's a bizarre way of looking at it. The Google Search Appliance and Google Mini boxes provide (among other things) both a HTML representation and an XML feed. While the former is produced from the latter, saying that it's not a Drupal issue just because if you're good enough with XSLT you can alter that HTML to your heart's content doesn't solve the problem of more general integration:

  • "How do I build the search form in Drupal?"
  • "How do you get a block listing your most popularly searched-for terms?"
  • "How do you make the navigation around the search results reflect the state of the rest of your site (navigation, other Drupal blocks etc.)?"

As I see it the primary output of the box is the XML feed, not the HTML. So Drupal needs something like the Aggregator module to interface with this feed on a dynamic basis. See JacobSingh's GSA / Google Mini Drupal Module referenced at the end of this thread.

--
J-P Stacey, software gardener, Magnetic Phield

aaustin’s picture

aaustin commented

I do not know too much about the Google search appliace because when we started looking at it, IBM gave away the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition tool and we ran with that. But I believe this was put out to be direct competition for Google's search appliance.

So what is cool about the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, is that it has an API that lets will return search results in OpenSearch format. So you can set it up to crawl your site or wherever and use the Open Search modules to act as your search interface - and your users never have to leave your Drupal framework.

I would image that the Google appliance might have a similar OpenSearch API, or something you could plug in to so you weren't locked in to their interface for searching.

matt_paz’s picture

matt_paz commented

Any demo sites we could see? I'd love to get a feel for the results that are returned and how they measure up to GSA ... very interesting!

matt_paz’s picture

matt_paz commented

You can see our implementation at
http://connect.educause.edu/search/advanced

aaustin’s picture

aaustin commented

Love the site. I really like the facets and other search features that I assume are coming from GSA.

We are not trying to index documents but library records. We have decided that it is just as easy as anything to make each library item a node and use Drupal's internal search.

So now we have since deprecated the OmniFind and are just using Drupal's internal search for now and are moving to the views fastsearch.

matt_paz’s picture

matt_paz commented

Would love to see your site ... can you provide a link? Also, I'd be curious how many records you have and how you're managing your library records. CCK? Cheers, Matt

scip’s picture

scip commented

Are you considering publishing or sharing the module/code for this?
With the release of the business CSE from Google it woul dbe really useful for the Drupal community

matt_paz’s picture

matt_paz commented

I've been amazed by the requests for this ... I'm working to see if we can get a baseline module in contrib ready form by the end of the month or early next month, but we'll see ... shifting priorities and what not. Keep an eye out. Hopefully we'll have something ready before you know it.

JacobSingh’s picture

JacobSingh commented

Hi folks,

Please see Google Appliance Module for Drupal .

This module currently supports keymatches, keywords, i18n compat (see the module page for more info).

I will be updating it regularly with new features, as the base class is robust enough to handle an advanced search, sorting, etc. It's currently in beta because I'd like some more feedback on the architecture / integration stories before rolling out more features, but a version of this is in production on a large site.

This module is partially funded by CivicActions

Look out for a full writeup this week at:
http://pajamadesign.com/?p=8

matt_paz’s picture

matt_paz commented

Thanks for developing this as we haven't been in a position to our code back out to the community. I'm looking forward to installing it and hope we can contribute back to this project.

brandon.dixon’s picture

brandon.dixon commented

Has anyone taken on the process of porting this to Drupal 6?