Google Ajax Search API

What You’ll Need

So what are you going to be doing here? You’ll be looking at and fiddling with the insides of web pages, viewing those pages in your choice of web browsers, and testing, testing, testing until your web applications work.

Fortunately, unlike other Search APIs out there, you don’t need access to a server or a computer that hosts your web site in order to add search to your web site. In addition, while it will be useful to have some prior knowledge about object-oriented programming and JavaScript, it’s not entirely necessary. Even if such terms are completely new to you, you should be able to easily figure out what is going on by the context and examples. You will, however, need to be familiar with the core concepts of HTML as this Short Cut is not going to cover HTML in too much detail.

What you will need is a text editor. Nothing special—just something you like. If you use Windows, Notepad will work just fine. We’re using TextMate (http://macromates.com/), but it only works on the Mac.

An Internet connection and a browser that supports Ajax are also required. If you haven’t upgraded for a while, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari. Personally, we’ll be using Firefox as we think it’s the best choice for the broadest audience. Why? Because it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and you can download it for free. Plus, simply put, we like it. In particular, we like Firefox 2, because it ...