How to show different looking results based on subcollection

March 9, 2006 in Google Mini,XML API,XSL | Comments (3)

A common question is “How can I make the Google Mini show a different results page depending on the subcollection being used?” You might want to do this because you have a search covering an intranet and public area, or just two very different sites.

The Mini can only show one design of results on it’s own, i.e. through the normal results page it shows, based on the XSL you can set up in the ‘Configure Serving -> Output Format’ section of the admin area. However, as long as you have a scripting language on your web server (e.g. PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, Perl) you can use the XML interface to get the results back, then change the way they look in one of two ways:

  1. Trigger some XSL with the scripting language, making it look the way you want – you can use the admin area of the Mini to design the XSL if it helps
  2. Alternatively, use the scripting language to parse the XML, and display it how you want. This is probably more convenient if you do not know XSL and do not have time to learn it, but do know some programming. Doing this in ColdFusion (MX or 7), ASP (v3 or above) or PHP 5 is relatively straightforward if you all ready know some XML, it’s slightly harder in PHP 4, but still very possible with a little more effort

These give you the flexibility of being able to choose a method that best suits you or your developers, and gives you a lot of control over the look and feel of search results.

Comments (3)

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  1. Comment by AltaGid — August 20, 2007 @ 10:20 pm

    Hello! Help solve the problem.
    Very often try to enter the site, but says that the password is not correct.
    Regrettably use of remembering. Give like to be?
    Thank you!

  2. Comment by Paul — August 21, 2007 @ 9:59 am

    To set a new password you’ll need to go to your Google Mini or Search Appliance and connect the cross-over patch lead that came with it to the second ethernet port.

    Then connect a computer to the patch lead and use a web browser to go to http://192.168.255.1:1111/ and you’ll be able to change the standard network settings and also the password used to access the normal admin area.

  3. Comment by Josh Malone — December 18, 2007 @ 10:08 pm

    There is 1 trick you can do. The Mini (at least v1) will accept an external XSLT URL on the HTTP query in place of the built-in one. You have to “whitelist” any external XLSTs by placing something like:

    #TRUSTED_STYLESHEETS:http://url.to/stylesheet.xslt

    in your “Follow and Crawl Only URLs” field. THen you can add the external XSLT path in your query like:

    proxystylesheet=http://url.to/stylesheet.xslt

    We have a few places in your intranet that embed search forms in them pointing at our Mini. I simply put that parameter in the form and then the mini uses that external XSLT to format the search results.

    (I host the XSLT files on another server – there’s no way to load them on the mini itself)

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