Leveraging Google Appliance in Sharepoint

Yesterday Mike (@next_connect) blogged about Sharepoint Search. A few back and forths about other benefits like federated search and indexing file shares, I found out he is using a Google appliance as are we. In our portal redesign, I had created a custom search box to leverage this. There might be better, more elegant ways to incorporate the Google into Sharepoint, but this is what I did.

As a recap, I took the BlueVerticle.master as the base for our site. I’m working off a copy of that for the customizations.

First I moved the search control to the hidden ASP Panel.

Then I built my new search input area,

		Choose a Search Engine
		Sharepoint
		ECU Website
		Google
	

		
	
	
	

Now the Javascript to make this work. This goes in the Head section of the master page.

That’s it in a nut shell. This is a basic implementation and just redirects the user to the search results page of the scope that is selected from the drop down list. I’m sure there are more advanced ways to do this, but I’ve found this to be a good solution to leverage our Google Mini. If you’ve got custom Sharepoint scopes created, they can be incorporated as well.

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