Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Three search engines, one interface – 25 minutes live code
It is amazing how much easier it is these days to build pretty sweet mashups by using hosted services. Here’s a screencast of using Yahoo, Bing and Google to build a search interface in under 25 minutes without having to read any API docs or installing SDKs by using YQL:
Building a search mashup with YQL using Google, Yahoo and Bing – live :) from Christian Heilmann on Vimeo.
Give it a lick of paint and you have a pretty sweet little tool:
All the source code is available on GitHub.





Cool… Unfortunately, this is powered by Google’s AJAX API, which doesn’t really work. http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=43
That was neat. But the typos (and at least one code mistake) were painful. I thought I mistyped a lot!
@dfabulich : Yes, but testing Google’s Ajax API was not the main purpose of this demo ;)
Good job Christian ! Love it !
@eyelidlessness – I am still young and inexperienced, I hope when I grow up I will be as awesome as you are. Until then I can only hope that useful feedback will make me better. And I love your URL.
@dfabulich Interesting point. However, “doesn’t work” is a bit harsh – it is a data issue, and I am sure with enough demand Google will change that. It is easy to switch to another API though.
This is awesome. YQL is awesome. I’m going to use it in a project I’m working on.
@Chris Heilmann – thanks for making the source available.
Good video, but I think this video would be even better with some audio (you talking) :).
Chris Heilmann, I’m sorry if that came across the way it seems it did. It was meant to be a bit humorous and was in no way meant as a dig against you. Obviously I thought the screencast was neat, which I said.
For what it’s worth, the only constructive criticism I could offer is that I did notice one code error (which I’d imagine you missed because you were moving quickly for the screencast): for one of the engines, you had copied and pasted the previous engine (forgive me, it’s been a day since I watched the video so I don’t remember which two), but forgot to change [copiedengine]out += ” to [pastedengine]out += ”.
It’s all sort of beside the point, as that code was barely the interesting part of the screencast. The idea that it’s as simple as that to mashup search results is very encouraging, and it’s cool to see it demonstrated. Thanks for your work.
That should read [copiedengine]out += ‘</ul>’ and [pastedengine]out += ‘</ul>’
Mashup… What a repulsive word (and concept).
amazing
thanks