Alan posted me a tweet earlier today asking me to prove my “genius” credentials (heh, heh;-):
As far as I know, Google CSEs don’t offer an RSS output (yet: Google websearch doesn’t either, though rumour has it that it will, soon… so maybe CSEs will open up with opensearch too?)
So here’s a workaround…
If you make a query in a Google CSE – such as the rather wonderful How Do I? instructional video CSE ;-) – you’ll notice in the URL an argument that says &cx=somEGobbleDYGookNumber234sTUfF&cof….
The characters between cx= and either the end of the URL or an ampersand (&) are the ID of the CSE. In the case of How Do I?, the ID is 009190243792682903990%3Aqppoopa3lxa – almost; the “%3A” is a safe encoding for the web of the character “:”, so the actual CSE ID is 009190243792682903990:qppoopa3lxa. But we can work round that, and work with the encoded CSE ID cut straight from the URL.
Using the Google AJAX search API, you can create a query on any CSE that will return a result using the JSON format (a javascript object that can be loaded into a web page). The Google AJAX search API documentation tells you how: construct a Google AJAX web search query using the root http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0 and add a few extra arguments to pull in results from a particular CSE: Web Search Specific Arguments.
JSON isn’t RSS, but we can get it into RSS quite easily, using a Yahoo pipe…
Just paste in the ID of a CSE (or the whole results URL), add your query, and subscribe to the results as an RSS feed from the More Options menu:
The pipe works as follows…
First up, create a text box to let a user enter a CSE ID cut and pasted from a CSE results page URL (this should work if you paste in the whole of the URL of the results page from a query made on your CSE):
Then create the search query input box, and along with the CSE ID use it to create a URL that calls the Google AJAX API:
Grab the JSON data feed from the Google AJAX Search API and translate the results so that the pipe will output a valid RSS feed:
And there you have it – an RSS feed for a particular query made on a particular Google CSE can be obtained from the Get as RSS output on the pipe’s More Options menu.
