Google Search Web Part
Mark Wagner
http://blogs.crsw.com/mark
June 10, 2005
Article: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/articles/1009.aspx
I created a custom Google web part a few weeks ago for my demo SharePoint site. You can see what it looks like on my testing SharePoint home page http://sharepoint.crsw.com. The Google web part submits a search request by navigating the user directly to the Google search web page and performs a Google search using the Google search engine. I have since received a number of emails requesting to get this web part for use on their SharePoint sites, so I decided to make it available for others.
First and foremost, the Google name and search service are the property of Google. I have no affiliation with the Google name and its services.
Google is a must-have resource for my daily work. If I need to find something, I Google it, and nothing else comes close when searching on the Internet. With this dependency, I had to have it on my new SharePoint demo site. My SharePoint demo site is more of a test-harness at this point since it is hosted on a shared/public server, so don’t be too disappointed when you see it.
For those of you not familiar with Google, welcome to the Internet. Google is the single best Internet search service available on the Internet, for the Internet. If you need to find something on the Internet, Google will find it for you. This process of searching is commonly referred to Googling. If you Google something, your are using Google to search the Internet for it. For the rest of you, Google is probably how you found this article.
It is important to remember that this Google Search web part is not intended to replace the SharePoint search feature. In order for Google to find any results, Google must have already searched and indexed your site. Also remember that Google will not be able to crawl and index pages on your SharePoint site that are not accessible to the public. This is where the SharePoint search has the upper hand. Again, this web part is not intended to replace the SharePoint search feature, but to conveniently access the much used Google search from your SharePoint page.
Configuring the Google Search Web Part
Here is a picture of the web part configurations.
Google Image URL
Once you have installed the web part, in the configuration options of the web part is a Google Image URL property which defaults to an image on Google’s web site. You should use the default url for the Google image. I have made this property available just in case Google renames or moves their image.
This Google Search Web Part can be configured in three distinct ways.
Standard Google Search
Local Site Search
Custom Site Search
Complete article here...