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Building a (re)search interface for Yahoo, Bing and Google with YQL

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

If you do a lot of research using web searches can be frustrating. Different search engines have different results, you need to open things in tabs and in general it can be pretty time consuming to find what you need.

To make this a bit easier I thought it’d be cool to have an interface that searches Yahoo, Google and Bing at the same time and thus I built GooHooBi:

As explained in the screen cast the thing under the hood of GooHooBi is YQL. Instead of fussing about with all the different search APIs all I did was to play with the YQL console and put together the following YQL statement:

select * from query.multi where queries=’

select Title,Description,Url,DisplayUrl

from microsoft.bing.web(20) where query=”cat”;

select title,clickurl,abstract,dispurl

from search.web(20) where query=”cat”;

select titleNoFormatting,url,content,visibleUrl

from google.search(20) where q=”cat”

‘

The query.multi table in YQL allows you to list a few queries which will be executed one after the other on the YQL server. The queries themselves I put together by using the different tables in the console and only selecting what I really need from each of them.

You can try this query in the YQL console and you can see the JSON output.

The rest is pretty easy. Cut this up into a parameterized string and do a cURL call:

$query = filter_input(INPUT_GET, ‘search’, FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);

	$queries[] = ‘select Title,Description,Url,DisplayUrl ‘.

‘from microsoft.bing.web(20) where query=”’.$query.’”’;

$queries[] = ‘select title,clickurl,abstract,dispurl ‘.

‘from search.web(20) where query = “’.$query.’”’;

$queries[] = ‘select titleNoFormatting,url,content,visibleUrl ‘.

‘from google.search(20) where q=”’.$query.’”’;

$url = “select * from query.multi where queries=’”.join($queries,’;’).”’”;

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

urlencode($url).’&format=json&env=store’.

‘%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys&diagnostics=false’;

	$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $api);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

$output = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

$data = json_decode($output);