Jan Murre (pareto): "Plone's search is great, google searches better". Plone's search is really good and more detailed than google can manage. But sometimes google does a better job for specific requirements.
One such a use case is a search engine that searches several internet sites at the same time. A solution is google's custom search engine .
A problem with that is that google does not apply with the web accessibility guidelines by using a "table" for layout. And compliance was needed in this case. This can be solved by using the xml api of google so you can show the results yourself.
In the google custom search engine you can add up to 5000 sites that you want google to search. The search results are taken from the ordinary google index. You have some options for custom branding, logo, colors and so.
Jan gave a demo on adding a search engine and adding the form to a plone site.
From $100 per year you can get yourself a business account for "cse". That removes the advertisements and gives you the xml api option. With that xml api, you can show the results on your own site instead of on www.google.com.
Python comes with batteries included, so it also has a load of libraries to make xml and internet development easy. Jan demoed urllib, elementtree, lxml, etc. And how google's results were shown in the plone interface.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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