On March 15th, we announced the Blog Bar. Like the News Bar, and Video Bar, the Blog Bar has seen phenomenal adoption. In the announcement message we asked for your feedback and ideas for improvement. Based on your feedback, we have updated the Blog Bar to include site restricted search. This means that you can now create a Blog Bar and program it to only search over a selected blog. As always, let us know what you think in the AJAX Search A

On February 7, we announced the availability of the Google News Bar. This cut-and-paste search control is simple to use and has seen phenomenal adoption.

Anytime we launch a new AJAX Search API feature, we ask you to share your thoughts with us in the AJAX Search API developer forum. Late Sunday evening, “CyberCoder” (a.k.a., inventor of the Google Video Bar) asked us to produce a modified News Bar that worked over Blog Search instead of News Search.

The Blog Bar below is the result. (Click here to see the original post if the Blog Bar does not display in your blog reader.)

The Blog Bar is a search control for the AJAX Search API that allows you to embed a thin horizontal strip, or a tall vertical strip of blog search results in your site.

As always, let us know what you think in the AJAX Search API developer forum.

In late January we announced the inclusion of YouTube Video results in the Google Video search index. Early this evening, we updated the Google AJAX Search API to include YouTube Video results via the GvideoSearch object.

For those of you using our advanced video search controls, you now have search and playback access to Google Videos as well as YouTube Videos. The VideoBar control, as well as the personalized home page gadget now searches over and plays a mix of Google Video content and YouTube content, as does the Video Search control (and gadget).

The easiest way to add these to your pages is to use our VideoBar Wizard or our Video Search Wizard. With these, all you have to do is answer a question or two and then we will write the code for you and then you just cut and paste onto your pages.

As always, let us know what you thing in the AJAX Search API developer forum.

We have always strongly supported those of you wishing to re-style AJAX search results. Each search result contains a number of properties (like title, visible url, snippet, etc.), as well as a standard .html property. Note: while it’s ok to re-style a search result, it is not ok to change the search result values (e.g., its not ok to replace a Google delivered url of http://www.vw.com/gti/ with http://please-click-on-this-virus-url.com).

One way to get the look and feel that you need is to build your own representation of a search result using the result’s core properties. This is the technique that we use in the News Bar, the Video Bar, the Map Search Control, etc.

Another very powerful approach is to use the .html property either standalone, or in conjunction with the core Search Control, and then use customized CSS rules to re-style the .html node. Using this approach you can select fonts, colors, spacing, visibility, borders, etc. We stil advocate using Firefox’s DOM Inspector or the Firebug Extension to get a feel for the DOM structure of a result. In addition, this morning, we published the skeleton format of each search result type. This should help those of you that are not fluent in DOM Inspector or Firebug.

As always, let us know what you think in the AJAX Search API developer forum. If this documentation style is a helpful way for you to learn about the DOM structure of a search result, we will use the same approach to document the DOM structure of the various search controls.

And finally, I know many of you are working hard to extend the Map Search Control. In an effort to make your attempts at this more robust and reliable, this morning, we published a formal mechanism (and sample) that you can use to gain access to the GMap2 objects that are at the heart of this control.

The AJAX Search API has always included a localized text based Search Control where the user-interface is presented in the language of the site visitor. The API includes a number of advanced search controls including:

• Map Search Control
• Video Bar
• Video Search Control
• News Bar
• Book Bar

These controls have seen strong world wide adoption. This afternoon, we upgraded all of these controls so that the user-interface they present is also localized and tracks the user-interface language of the underlying AJAX Search API.

The AJAX Search API auto-detects the user-interface language of your visitors and adjusts the UI accordingly. If you want to, you can hard code the user-interface language by using the &hl argument in your AJAX Search API script load tag. For example, to hard code your user-interface language to french, change your load tag to include: <script src="...api?file=uds.js&hl=fr...">

As always, please let us know what you think in the AJAX Search API developer forum.

We just launched a new cut-and-paste solution for the AJAX Search API that lets you embed a dynamic Google News bar in your web pages:

Just enter the searches you want to power the news bar, and the AJAX Search API does the rest. We support two different form factors — a thin horizontal strip and a wider vertical bar — so it’s easy to incorporate dynamic news content into the layout of your site.

We’ve also added support for Book Search to the AJAX Search API. To make it easy to get started with this new type of search, we created a cut-and-paste solution for a dynamic “book bar” just like the News bar above. So if you have a site related to, say, fish, you can integrate a dynamic bookshelf of fish-related books without writing a line of code — a fun way to attract new visitors to your site.

Let us know what you think in the AJAX Search API developer forum.

Check out our new homepage; we’ve reorganized our website and examples to reflect the different ways you can use the AJAX Search API: web search (including custom search engine, news search, and blog search), local search, and video search.

We’ve also added a new code samples page, which is a great way to learn about common ways to use the API. And for those who would rather not code, we’ve added a link to our wizards.

This afternoon we made two small updates to the service.

More results link

For those of you using the GSearchControl, you will notice a new link, “More results »” underneath a collection of search results. This link will take your users to the appropriate Google.com property (web search, video search, etc.) with their current query where they can do deeper research.

The link uses typical AJAX Search API constructs. You control the link target just like you do for your search result links by using the setLinkTarget method. You can change its style or disable it using CSS. If you do not want this link visible on this site, you can use this snippet of CSS (after including gsearch.css) to turn it off.

/* disable More results >> link under a bundle of results */
div.gsc-trailing-more-results { display : none; }

Video Bar Features

The Video Bar solution has been enhanced to support an “auto execute list.” You can now supply a video bar with a list of search expressions and it will randomly, or sequentially, cycle through your list and update itself. You control the list, the cycle time, and the order with simple options. The instructions page walks you through this simple process. Note: the right hand video bar is programmed to use this new feature.

As always, please continue to share your ideas and feedback with us.

We’ve made it easier to get started with the Google AJAX Search API and Google Maps API. Just customize how you want a searchable map to be displayed on your site, and the Map Search wizard will write the code for you. All you need to do is copy and paste the custom code into your web page.

Your users will be able to search for places around a predefined center location and see the results without leaving your page. For example, try searching for ‘coffee’ on this map centered on Google:

If you want to add points of interest, change the center icon, or customize the functionality even more, check out the more detailed documentation. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

You may have heard that the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes AJAX development easier, but now we’ve made it even easier to dive into AJAX

A couple months ago we asked you to submit your sample apps that made use of the Google AJAX Search API. We’ve now posted a few of those to the community samples page. If you’d like to see your web app on that page, be sure to submit it for inclusion. And, as always, feel free to share your thoughts on these samples and other uses of the API.

We’re excited to see people building support for the Google AJAX Search API into a lot of popular tools:

• Wordpress Video Bar Widget from Rune Fjellheim (aka “Daiko”)
• Drupal Module from Maciej Perlinski at Meant4.pl
• Blogger beta Template from Hoctro

(We mentioned the templates for Blogger and Typepad in an earlier post.)

Thanks to everyone who has built tools to make it easier to use the AJAX Search API. If you know about others, let us know!

On Tuesday we announced our support for Custom Search Engines. We asked you for your input and many of you suggested that we add support for Custom Search Engine Refinements. This evening we launched support for Custom Search Engine Refinements in a way that complements what many of you are trying to build. We extended .setSiteRestriction() so that in addition to passing the Custom Search Engine Id, you can also pass a Custom Search Engine Refinement label. See the code snippet below:

var cseId = "017576662512468239146:omuauf_lfve";
searcher = new GwebSearch();
searcher.setSiteRestriction(cseId, "Lectures");

To demonstrate this new capability, we have produce a new sample. The AJAX Search API based Curriculum Search Sample performs parallel searches over a Curriculum Search Engine as well as the engine with a “Lectures”, “Assignments”, and “Reference” refinements. This sample is based on the full blown Curriculum Search Engine hosted on code.google.com/edu.

As always, please continue to provide feedback.

Last night Google launched the Google Custom Search Engine. (You can read more on the Google Blog.) We added support for this to the AJAX Search API so you get results from your Custom Search Engine through GwebSearch().

Your Custom Search Engine is identified by its ID, which shows up as a “cx” value in the search box code (e.g., “000455696194071821846:reviews”). In order to restrict a web search to only search results from your Custom Search Engine just call .setSiteRestriction() and pass it its unique ID. You can read more about this in our online documentation.

It’s not our style to leave you hanging with just words, so we put together a sample application that uses Custom Search Engines with the AJAX Search API. The sample application uses four Custom Search Engines: one that’s all about product reviews, one for price comparisons, one for forums and message boards, and one for shopping. In addition, we threw in a tab for Blog Search, one for unrestricted Web Search, and one for News. For a little color, there’s a Video Bar across the bottom as well. In addition to demonstrating Custom Search Engines, the sample also shows some advanced CSS styling and coordination of multiple search controls from a single search form. We hope you find this useful, and we’ll look for your comments in the developer forum.

The Video Bar has become a popular solution, and we really appreciate the great feedback and feature requests. We just implemented two of the most common feature requests:

• Option for smaller thumbnails
• Control over the size of the video player

For more information, take a look at the Video Bar instructions that highlights both of these new features. Requesting small thumbnails is done with an option, while controlling the video player size is done using CSS. (We’ve also updated the Video Search solution to support CSS based control over the player size.)

Based on your feedback, we also updated the Map Search solution with new features:

• Application control over the icons for the center point, the selected search result, and the unselected search results
• Control over the zoom level for the idle and active map
• Ability to request a GMapTypeControl for your maps

You’re welcome to use our solutions as-is in your applications. We will maintain them, host them, and continue to improve them based on your feedback. Alternatively, you can always download our solutions and modify them to meet your needs, borrow ideas from them freely, or do whatever makes sense for your applications. Keep the feedback coming!

I just ran accross some more competition for Google’s online word processing and Spreadsheet applications. Zoho is a complete office suite offering free online word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation applications. Zoho also offers some other interesting productivity tools and utilities.

According to the official Google reader blog, Google has just released a few more upgrades to the Google reader interface. This comes one week after their big improvements to their reader. Here’s a quick summary of the new features:

• You can pick your start page - In preferences, you can choose what page to show by default when you log into google reader. It can be the All feeds page, the homepage, or any category.
• You can hide the left navigation pane - If you’re tired of seeing a list of hundreds of feeds there, and you want to maximise your reading real estate, just hit “u” to toggle between showing and hiding the pane.
• Feed refreshing - Google reader now automatically refreshes itself to keep you up-to-the-minute. If you’re even to impatient for that, they’ve included a small “refresh” link as well.
• Spacebar - Use the spacebar to go from item to item.

So there you have it. Google keeps listening to users’ input and continues to improve the product. Now all I’m waiting for is drag-and-drop rearrangement for feeds/categories so I don’t have to go to the “Manage Categories” page, which I think is not the most intuitive page.

We just released Version 1.0 of the AJAX Search API. New in this version:

• Google News results. We’ve added a GnewsSearch searcher that gives access to Google News results and lets you restrict to specific specific news sources.
• Maps results for more geos. In addition to the U.S., GlocalSearch now includes results in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
• Intranet use. A lot of people wanted to use the API within an enterprise setting. Now you can, as long as your service is accessible to your end users without charge. See the terms of use to learn more.

Another addition is that the Web Search results may now include up to 2-4 clearly marked sponsored links. Including these ads is still a bit of an experiment so we won’t be charging advertisers, and we may end up adjusting their format, etc.

We’ve been really excited by the great stuff that people have done with the API and soon will be showcasing some of it on a community samples page. If you’re interested in submitting your web app for inclusion in that page, we’ve posted instructions here.

As always, let us know what you think!

Update: To take advantage of the new v1.0 features, make sure you change the version number in your API Load script tag — from v=0.1 to v=1.0

Many of you saw last week’s post on using the AJAX Search API in TypePad and Blogger and have already taken these ideas and enhanced your own blogs. An early adopter of the API known as “CyberCoder” had a cool idea… He envisioned a “Video Bar” that could sit in a narrow side bar vertically, or across the top or bottom of a page horizontally.

Last night we launched a Video Bar solution. This makes a great addition to your blogs and pages and composes nicely with an existing Video Search solution. To show you an example, we added the video bar to our AJAX Search API Playground blog.

Check out more of our solutions and samples:

• Map Search solution
• Video Search solution
• List of all our samples

Many of you have already integrated the Google AJAX Search API into your blogs. Yesterday, I built some sample integrations on both TypePad and on Blogger. I went a little overboard, but I did this to demonstrate a few ideas that you might want to clone into your own blogs.

Take a look at both our TypePad based sample and our Blogger based sample.

Both samples offer the following features:

Google Search Form in the sidebar with tabbed search results displayed in the center column

As mentioned in the developer forum, we recently rolled out a new user interface for the search form that’s an integral part of the basic search control. Part of this change is better support for decoupling the search form from the result set and building custom search forms when you are coding to the raw GSearch() layer. The system now supports two new modes of operation which are covered in our online documentation:

1. Using the GdrawOptions() object, you can now set the location of your search form in a way that decouples it from the rest of the search results. This is useful, for example, when you want a search form in the sidebar of a page, with results stacked in the center. A new sample, searchformroot.html demonstrates this.
    
2. For those of you not using the search control, and instead coding to the raw GSearch layer, a new GSearchForm() object has been created. This object is designed to build a search form for you that is identical to the one used in the search control, but in this object, you control the various submit and click events, and you have direct access to the input element. Several of our sample applets and solutions have been converted to use this new object including places.html, the video search solution, and the map search solution.

When you have a chance, please take a look at these new features, and if applicable, please migrate your applications to this new model.

On a separate topic, we’ve also added some documentation for the Map Search solution. It now includes step-by-step instructions for how to add it to your page and configure it. This has become a popular solution and we wanted to ensure that more people could easily take advantage of it.

There’s now a Google Video gadget that people can add to their Google homepage. The gadget is based on the Video Search solution, which you can use to add videos to your blog or website. Check out the gadget and let us know what you think.

Last week my son asked me if I could show him how to add some videos to his music review blog. Instead of just putting one video on the blog, I decided that it would be sort of fun to have 100+ videos directly accessible from any blog or web page.

The result of this effort is a Video Search solution. Like the Mapsearch solution, this is something you can use as-is or copy and enhance to suit your needs.

We tried to make this easy to use on any

We’re looking for sample web apps that make use of the Google AJAX Search API. If you’re interested in submitting your site, please send an email to code-submission@google.com with the following info:

your name
name of the web app
its URL
URL for a 129×110 JPG or PNG thumbnail
list of APIs used
suggested description

For example:
Mark L.
Official Google Map Search Gadget
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=mapsearch.xml
http

One thing that’s been on our list for a while now is changing the current UI for switching between one search result, more search results, and all search results. The new treatment uses three buttons that let you quickly select one, more, or all search results. Each button has “tool tip” style text that shows up on hover to help everyone learn the meaning of the buttons (note the tool tips are in English, but are in the localization queue).

We’

We just released a Google Map Search gadget that makes use of the Google AJAX Search API, the Google Maps API, and Google Gadgets API. This helps accomplish Mark’s goal of using as many APIs at once as possible, as well as my goal of trying to use “Google” in a sentence as many times as possible without making it too obvious.

If you’re interested in maps mashups, you may want to check out some of our samples, like My Favorite Places and My Phon

This week I am speaking on Search APIs at the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Unfortunately, by the time I got around to reading the Hotel and Venue page, I discovered that all the recommended hotels are sold out.

When I look at that page, all I see is text (and of course a sidebar of logos for the sponsors). Where is the map? Why can’t I just just search for a nearby hotel directly from this page, or search for nearby restaurants? This ha

We just posted a public issue tracking website for the Google AJAX Search API. This is to make it easier to track our progress on bugs and feature requests. As you encounter issues with the API, you can report them in the developer forum and we’ll add reproducible bugs and common feature requests to this list.

The issues include workarounds if applicable, as well as links back to the discussion group threads where the problem has been discussed

We made some changes over the last several days, relating mostly to GlocalSearch, but also impacting GblogSearch.

Previously, GlocalSearch commingled address resolution results with local search results, providing things like “New York, NY 10038″ alongside “New York Pretzel” and “New York Cafe.” There’s now a method for indicating whether you want those address resolution results included. You can set this yourself or expose it to users with t

Given the recent activity on the message board, here’s an update on some of the key validation problems that affected people earlier in the week. There were two distinct, but somewhat related issues at hand, both of which have been resolved.

First, people received errors because “GSearchControl” was undefined

We launched the Google AJAX Search API as a Version 0.1 so that we could take a little bit of time to gather feedback from developers. We’ve been reading the developer forum and taking note of your feedback on the current API, as well as suggestions that would make integrating it into your applications easier and more seamless.

One feature that several people have requested is the ability to control link targets in the search results, since links were being uniformly created with target=”_blank”

Yesterday we launched a new gadget for the Google Personalized Homepage that is based on the Google AJAX Search API. Why embed a search gadget on a search homepage, you may ask? Well, it can actually be pretty useful. I have mine configured for just GlocalSearch() scoped to my home town. I use it as a very fast, in-page phone book

We launched the Google AJAX Search API as a Version 0.1 API so that we could take a little bit of time to gather feedback from you. We welcome feedback on the current API as well as suggest features that we could add that would make your lives easier.
One suggestion that we have heard from many of you concerns site restricted searching

This is the official blog of the Google AJAX Search API. We are going to use this blog to publish official updates, tips, and workarounds, and announce new releases. The easiest way to be notified of changes is to subscribe to our Atom feed.

If you have any questions in the meantime, head on over to the developer forum. Google engineers will participate in the group along with other AJAX Search API developers to help answer your questions.

If you need any creative inspiration to get started with the API, check out the nice set of sample applications on our web site.

Google bought Writely several weeks ago, in an attempt to challenge Microsoft’s domination of the Word processing market. Ajaxwrite a new Javascript powered online word processor brought to us by Ajaxlaunch, is now offering some pretty stiff competition. AjaxWrite is platform independant, the only requirement is a Firefox browser, and you can access, create and save Word documents from any computer. AjaxWrite doesn’t offer all the options that MS Word offers, but admittedly, Word has so many obscure functions, that instead of enhancing your productivity, it can hamper it. I personally hate the “personalized” menus. I’m way faster if I can always count on a menu option being in the exact same place. For that matter, I prefer keyboard commands. For me they are a lot faster. Anyways, to get back to the subject at hand, I tried out AjaxWrite and it worked pretty good for me. It had all the basic functionality that I need in a word processor, and I saved the document to my HHD without a hitch. Will I use it everyday? Probably not right now (OpenOffice is working fine for me), but if I’m ever on a box that doesn’t have a word processor, I can always fire up FireFox, and create my Word document. I give it a full thumbs up.