Google Custom Search .NET API (Miscellaneous)

What is Google custom search?

Google custom search is a powerful, yet simple search engine. It allows the searching and presentation of search results on you website with the minimum of fuss.

What is the Google custom search API?

The Google Custom Search API lets you develop websites and programs to retrieve and display search results from Google Custom Search programmatically. With this API, you can use make requests to get either web search or image search results.

What is the Google custom search .NET API?

The power of Google custom search is now at your fingertips using a well built and powerful .NET API. Take advantage of the features of Google custom search using simple .NET calls. The component is written in C# and brings the power of custom search to all your .NET applications including:

Console
Windows Forms
WPF
ASP.NET
ASP.NET MVC
Windows Services
Web Services (XML/WCF)
Silverlight
All .NET applications

What features are available when searching?

The search features available within the component are:

Specify the search terms
Specify page
Turns on/off the translation between zh-CN and zh-TW
Country restriction
Specify linked custom search engine or use custom search engine ID
Specify all search results from a time period
Identify a phrase that all documents in the search results must contain
Identify a word or phrase that should not appear in any documents in the search results
Returns images of a specified type
Controls turning on or off the duplicate content
Specify geolocation of end user
The local Google domain to use to perform the search
Sets the user interface language
Allows the addition of extra query terms
Specify image colour
Return images of a specific dominant colour
Return images of a specified size
Return images of a specific type
Specify that all search results should contain a link to a particular URL
Specify the language restriction for the search results
Provide additional search terms to check for in a document, where each document in the search results must contain at least one of the additional search terms
Specify that all search results should be pages that are related to the specified URL
Specify filter based on licensing
Search safety level
Specify the search type (web pages or images)
Specify all search results should be pages from a given site
Controls whether to include or exclude results from a site

What do you get with your purchase?

Fully documented solution (source code)
1 x ASP.NET MVC demo application
1 x ASP.NET WebForm demo application
1 x Console demo application
Compiled assemblies ready to use in your application
Full documentation on how to use the component

Here is a simple example of how to take advantage of our Fluent & Standard API to perform and search using a search engine defined from your Google account. Learn more about creating search engines and getting API access to the Google services.

Fluent API

var authToken = new ApiKeyAuth([...Your GoogleApiKey...]);
var searchEngine = new SearchEngineIdBased([...Your SearchEngineId...]);

// Use fluent API
var searchResults = new GoogleFluentCustomSearch()
    .SetSearchTerms("codecanyon")
    .SetPage((new Page())
                 .SetPageNumber(1)
                 .SetPageSize(10))
    .SetAuthenticator(authToken)
    .SetSearchEngine(searchEngine)
    .Search();

Standard API

var authToken = new ApiKeyAuth([...Your GoogleApiKey...]);
var searchEngine = new SearchEngineIdBased([...Your SearchEngineId...]);

// Use standard API
var standardSearch = new GoogleCustomSearch(authToken, searchEngine);
var query = new SearchQuery()
    {
        SearchTerms = searchTerms,
        Page = new Page(pageNumber, 5)
    };
searchResults = standardSearch.Search(query);

Fluent API & Asynchronous search

// Use fluent API & Asynchronous search
void Search() 
{
    new GoogleFluentCustomSearch()
        .SetSearchTerms(searchTerms)
        .SetPage((new Page())
                     .SetPageNumber(pageNumber)
                     .SetPageSize(5))
        .SetAuthenticator(authToken)
        .SetSearchEngine(searchEngine)
        .OnSearchComplete(ProcessSearchResults)
        .SearchAsync();
}

void ProcessSearchResults(SearchResult searchResults)
{
    ...
}

Search results

The search results offer a comprehensive object from the data Google offers and contains the following parts:

Search results
Current, Next and Previous page search queries
Search spelling – Encapsulates a corrected query
Search information – Encapsulates all information about the search
Search URL – The OpenSearch URL element that defines the template for the API.
Search kind – Unique identifier for the type of current object
Search context – Metadata about the particular search engine that was used for performing the search query

What else do you get from this component?

Fully commented
Excellent memory management
Optimised for performance
Supports ThreadPool and non-ThreadPool asynchronous/parallel searches. Necessary for ASP.NET applications to avoid the dreaded “service unavailable” when processing high volumes
Strong name signed – Allows referencing in other application that are strong named signed & also can be installed to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

This component is built using the .NET 3.5 Framework which means in can be used in all .NET applications that are using the 3.5 framework or later. This includes .NET 3.5, 4.0, & 4.5, +.