This morning I stumbled upon this funny article on predictably irrational which shows the difference between men and women by using Google Autosuggest:

Google suggest has been the source of many a joke so far (and there are even collections of those available) and I wondered how hard it would be to write a comparison tool.

Turns out it is dead easy, see it here:

The first step was to find the right API. A Google search for “Google Suggest API” gave me this old blog post on blogoscoped which told me about the endpoint for an XML output of the Google Suggest:

http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=chuck+norris

The result is very straight forward XML:

	






[... repeated 10 times with other data …]

Now to get more than one I could have used two calls, but why do that when you have YQL?

select * from xml where url in (
‘http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=chuck+norris’,
‘http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=steven+seagal’
)

Using this gives me a dataset with both results:

yahoo:count=”2” yahoo:created=”2010-01-11T03:48:43Z”

yahoo:lang=”en-US” yahoo:updated=”2010-01-11T03:48:43Z”

yahoo:uri=”http://quer[...]al%27%29”>




	








[... repeated with different data …]


	

	








[... repeated with different data …]


	

Good, that’s the data – now for the interface. Using YUI grids and the grids builder it is easy to build this:

Google suggest comparisons










Question 1:

	


Question 2:
	

All that is left is the PHP:

// turn off error reporting and define error as empty

error_reporting(0);

$error = ‘’;


	
// check if parameters were sent and filter them for display

// and for use in a link.

if(isset($_GET[‘q1’]) && isset($_GET[‘q2’])){

$q1search = filter_input(INPUT_GET, ‘q1’, FILTER_SANITIZE_ENCODED);

$q2search = filter_input(INPUT_GET, ‘q2’, FILTER_SANITIZE_ENCODED);

$q1 = filter_input(INPUT_GET, ‘q1’, FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);

$q2 = filter_input(INPUT_GET, ‘q2’, FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);

	
// assemble the YQL URI with the q1search and q2search

// as parameters – get back JSON as XML makes my teeth hurt

$url= ‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=’.

‘select%20*%20from%20xml%20where%20url%20in%20’.

‘(‘http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Fcomplete%2Fsearch’.

‘%3Foutput%3Dtoolbar%26q%3D’.urlencode($q1search).

‘’%2C’http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Fcomplete%2F’.

‘search%3Foutput%3Dtoolbar%26q%3D’.urlencode($q2search).

‘’)&format=json’;

	
// Use cURL to load it

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$output = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

	
// decode the data and get the first result set.

$data = json_decode($output);

$res1 = $data->query->results->toplevel[0]->CompleteSuggestion;

	
// if data came through, assemble the list to be shown

if(sizeof($res1)>0){

$out1 = ‘
‘;

foreach($res1 as $r){

$out1 .= ‘
‘.$r->suggestion->data.’
‘;

}

	
$out1 .= ‘
‘;

// otherwise assemble an error message

} else {

$out1 = ‘
Error: No results found
‘;

}

	
// do the same for the second set

$res2 = $data->query->results->toplevel[1]->CompleteSuggestion;

if(sizeof($res2)>0){

$out2 = ‘
‘;

foreach($res2 as $r){

$out2 .= ‘
‘.$r->suggestion->data.’
‘;

}

	
$out2 .= ‘
‘;

} else {

$out = ‘
Error: No results found
‘;

}

	
// if no data was sent, say so…

} else {

$error = ‘Please enter a search term for each box.’;

}
	
?>

That’s it! Adding a lick of CSS and we have the final product.