DEV Community

Discussion on: Create custom Google search engine for your domain(s) and fetch results as JSON

Collapse
 
jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Hi Siya, you need to make a search form on your webpage. A single input that fetches the JSON from your search engine URL and then populates the body or desired HTML element with the results.

Do you need an example of how to do that?

Collapse
 
makwelos profile image
Siya

Thank you, Jockem.
Can you please provide me with the example. I can create the search form, i am not sure what to do with the JS fetch code and how to display the results.

Thread Thread
 
jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel
<!-- when the form is submitted, either with submit button or ENTER key, call search() -->
<form onsubmit="return search()">
    <input type="text" id="query">
</form>
<!-- show the results in this DIV -->
<div id="results"></div>

<script>
function search() {
    const cx = '009833334622897458665:rtvizlb' // your search engine id 
    const apikey = 'AIzaSyAmvBcHwO9VtVny-cVrP7IhXJ' // your api key

    /* select the input element */
    let input = document.getElementById('query')

    /* fetch the following URL that includes apikey, cx and the value of input */
    fetch(`https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=${apikey}&cx=${cx}&q=${input.value}`).then(response => response.text()).then(text => {
        let result = JSON.parse(text)
        result.items.forEach(item => {
            /* add it to your results div */
            // item.link, item.title, ...etc
        })
    })
    /* make sure the form isn't actually submitted by returning false */
    return false 
}
</script>

More details about what happens with fetch:

/* this fetches the URL and resolves response */
fetch(`https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=${apikey}&cx=${cx}&q=${input.value}`)

/* this resolves only the responseText */
.then(response => response.text())

/* parse the responseText to Object */
JSON.parse(text)

The Object parsed from JSON looks like this:

Each item in result.items looks like this:

I'll let it up to you figuring out how to add an item to your result DIV. (create an <a> element and set its href attribute to item.link)

Thread Thread
 
makwelos profile image
Siya

Awesome, thank you so much Jochem.
I got it:)

Thread Thread
 
cazp83 profile image
César Augusto Zapata • Edited

Hi Jochem!

Great tut! I was wondering if It's possible to add the autocomplete feature on this form input

Thread Thread
 
jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

To use Google Suggest, you need a server. Cross Domain XMLHttpRequests are not allowed. I have actually created an NPM module for Google Suggest that does exactly that. It fetches suggestions from Google Search.
All you need to do is create a server that pipes the response to the client and then use some jQuery auto-complete plugin to render them visually.

Thread Thread
 
cazp83 profile image
César Augusto Zapata

Hi Jochem, thanks for the advise, very useful. I'll look into this.

Thread Thread
 
jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Did you figure it out? Does it need an article?

Thread Thread
 
cazp83 profile image
César Augusto Zapata

Thanks for the follow up Jochem, however I'm more interested in receiving suggestions based on the sites listed in my search engine rather than the entire web. Recently I found this function (google.search.CustomSearchControl.attachAutoCompletion) so I'm going to try implement it in my project, thanks again.

Collapse
 
shnackob profile image
Jake / Smack • Edited

Hi Jochem,

thanks a ton for this tutorial. I'm a bit of a newbie and I can't seem to find where I can put the 'a' element with href to item.link that will send it back to the

. I'm sure it's something simple but I can't seem to find it. I googled things like "add json elements in script to div" and looked at this

stackoverflow.com/questions/567779...

But no luck. Help would be appreciated thank you!

Thread Thread
 
jochemstoel profile image
Jochem Stoel

Hi Jake, there is something wrong with the formatting of your message. Did you forget a closing character?

You need to iterate the results like I showed already and create an <a> element for each result with its href attribute set to the value of item.link.

result.items.forEach(item => {
   /* create an <a> element */
   var a = document.createElement('a')
   /* set the href attribute to the value of item.link */
   a.setAttribute('href', item.link)
   /* also set a clickable text of course */
   a.innerText = item.title

   /* select the element you want to insert the link into 
      i assume here that is a div with id="results" */
   var resultsDiv = document.getElementById('results')
   /* insert the <a> into the result div */
   resultsDiv.appendChild(a)
})

Voila! And you are done.

You will notice that every link will appear on one line this way, so you want to wrap them in a <p> element or some other element that automatically does a newline. You have two options here.
Option 1 is to create an additional <p> element and inject the <a> into that, the second option is just writing the HTML you want in a single line. A little ugly but works too and nothing wrong with it. For example:

result.items.forEach(item => {
   /* basically this says, replace the innerHTML of this div 
      with what is already there + our new extra HTML */
   var results = document.getElementById('results')
   results.innerHTML = results.innerHTML + `<p><a href="${item.link}">${item.title}</a></p>`
})

If you are using jQuery it is even easier.

result.items.forEach(item => {
   $('#results').append(`<p><a href="${item.link}">${item.title}</a></p>`)
})

If you made it through the tutorial then this should really answer your question.

Thread Thread
 
shnackob profile image
Jake / Smack • Edited

Ah yes I see that mistake. Thank you so much for your quick reply, this helps massively! This is exactly what I need. I tried using 'results.innerHTML' but I had passed the string incorrectly it seems. I have this working perfect now, and all of your helpful information has made it easy to understand why it works. Once again thank you so much!