http://www.gsadeveloper.com Google Search Appliance and Google Mini development Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:52:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In case you've wondered, when your Google Search Appliance license runs out, you'll receive this message in the admin area: The license has expired. You are in the grace period. The software will stop crawling, indexing, and serving in 14 days. Please contact Google to extend your license. The GSA will keep ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2008/03/27/when-your-gsa-license-runs-out/ The MID series Google Minis have a cross-site scripting vulnerability, Google Enterprise has just released a patch for it in the support area (you'll need your support login and password to get to it.) If you're not sure what age Mini you have, there's a test code on that page you ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2007/09/27/google-mini-xss-vulnerability/ A question I've seen come up a lot which isn't answered directly by my earlier post is whether the Google Mini or Search Appliance can spider raw XML. Unfortunately, no, it cannot. The Mini / Search Appliance can read the XML, but it takes it in as straight text, so any ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2007/01/16/spider-xml-google-mini/ When using the XML API to your Google Mini or Search Appliance, if a page in the search results does not have a <title> in it's HTML, then it does not have a 'T' node (in GSP/RES/R/T) in the XML returned for the search. The XSLT controlling the look of the ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2007/01/08/pages-titles-blank-t/ If you are creating new subcollections on your Google Mini (v1), and you want to search them from a drop down menu on the frontend, you will need to refresh the frontend to do it. Sound confusing, just do these steps (the same goes for turning on the menu for ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2007/01/08/searching-subcollections-frontend/ The search site p2b, powered by a Google Search Appliance, has been nominated in the Brighton & Hove Web Awards. Oddly enough, it's hosting the site for the awards, but nominations are separate for that so there shouldn't be any shenannigans going on. I worked on p2b last summer, writing sets ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/11/08/p2b-nominated/ While setting up a Google Mini search for a site recently, I kept getting an error message like this: /export/hda3/4.3.105.M.6/local/conf/frontends/default_Frontend/domain_filter (No such file or directory) When trying to use the XML API to get the results back. I tried various things and eventually contacted the host to make sure their setup wasn't ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/09/29/fixing-error-export-hda3/ I'm happy to announce my latest Google Mini project: Course Searcher It's a search engine that covers educational courses for 14-19 year olds in Brighton and Hove (the area of the UK I live in.) I've written up what I did for the project in on my freelancing site. We've used custom ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/09/15/latest-project-course-searcher/ If you want your Google Mini or Search Appliance to ignore part of your page, you can use some special tags to stop the content being indexed (and therefore brought back in the search results.) Surround the content you want ignored with the following tags: <!-- googleoff: index --> <!-- ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/07/28/ignoring-content/ When you're using custom meta tags on your pages so you can serve up or search very specific information in your Google Mini or Search Appliance, it's important to chose a meta name that will not conflict with other meta tags that might exist on your site or the public ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/05/04/custom-meta-tags-in-search-results-and-full-stops/ When you're spidering (or 'crawling') using your Google Mini, you get a little box telling you it's status - or at least you do on the old/v1 Mini, I haven't tried a new Mini yet. Within the box you get a list of: Total Inflight URLs - these are links it has ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/05/04/crawling-status-in-your-google-mini/ Many web sites use sessions to keep track of visitors as they browse around. If you do not have cookies turned on in your browser, the cookie may be sent through the URL so the site can still track you. This is very useful if it's storing your shopping basket ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/04/20/avoiding-session-ids-when-spidering/ 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 ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/03/09/show-different-subcollection/ I've had these questions myself, and been asked it by a few people: "How do I put my website pages on a Google Mini?" and "Can I install my own application on a Mini, e.g. my web app or webstats?" The answer to both questions is: no, you cannot put your ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/03/09/can-you-put-new-pages-or-applications-on-a-google-mini/ I've been talking to various people recently, both by e-mail and at the Mini Google Group, who want to use a Mini for things it really isn't suited for, so hopefully this will be helpful: What the Google Mini is good at It is very good at searching through lots of unstructured ... http://www.gsadeveloper.com/2006/03/07/google-mini-good-not-good/