Working with the Google Search Appliance (GSA), for most developers, is pretty straightforward. To get a GSA up and running with a basic search, you won’t have to do much more than point it’s crawling mechanism towards the content you want to make searchable. A search interface / web server is built right in.

For a majority of organizations implementing a site search, that’s really all they need. The New Jersey Institute of Technology, for example, uses that default search interface to serve the purposes of a custom site search. LTech has completed projects like this for Hess, PayPal, Advent International, and others.

LTech’s GSA “Bridge” acted as a .NET library/webservice to serve as an easy-to-use liason between C# and the GSA. Since Search Appliance requests are typically made with POSTs and retrievals of formatted XML, interacting with objects in C# which handle all of that functionality is extremely convenient.

So what about PHP? Creating a PHP-based bridge to the GSA, or at least a GSA call wrapper, would be benefical to a lot of organizations that might need the more complex functionality mentioned above, and are looking for an easy way to interact with the Appliance. At LTech, we’re looking into this for some future projects — and we might build as GSA Bridge for PHP.

Doing a little research on the topic yields some interesting results. At Cornell’s open source repository, developers have created some abstracted GSA-call wrapper classes to send XML queries to the GSA, retrieve an XML result set, and convert results into PHP objects. It’s nicely done, and is available here.

There is also a script for MediaWiki, the open source Wiki platform that Wikipedia runs on. The script, which is up on Google Code, is basic: it takes search parameters through the GET string, parses them out, and forwards a formatted XML query to the GSA. It’s short, simple, and to-the-point.

So far, there isn’t much to compare feature-wise with LTech’s GSA Bridge, which can make things like faceted searches and rule-based result manipulation a snap. Keep on the lookout for some updates on this project — LTech might roll out with an easy-to-use PHP-to-GSA library soon.