Creating a Search Form

You can take full advantage of the new Google Search Appliance by adding a search form to your site. The form helps visitors find content within your site. You also can restrict the search to a specific website or collection of sites by using frontend names, and you can give the option of searching all the Duke websites.

The search box can look like the following example:

Here's how to include a Search box on your Web page. Be sure to read all of the instructions to get the most out of your search.

Insert the following HTML into your page where you want the search box to appear. This code provides a search form that is functionally identical to the form above.

<form name="sample_search_form" action="http://google.oit.duke.edu/search" method="get">
    <input type="text" onfocus="this.value='';" maxlength="255" size="50" value="Enter Search Terms Here" name="q" /><input type="image" xsrc="images/search_go.gif" mce_src="images/search_go.gif" width="20" height="15" align="middle" hspace="5" name="submitButton" alt="Submit the Search Request" border="0" /><br />
    <input type="radio" value="oit" name="client" checked="checked" />OIT Site &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <input type="radio" value="duke_collection" name="client" />All Duke Sites
    <input type="hidden" value="duke_collection" name="site" />
    <input type="hidden" value="oit" name="proxystylesheet" />
    <input type="hidden" value="xml_no_dtd" name="output" />
</form>

NOTE: If your site uses frontends – like "OIT Site" and "oit" – in the code, it should be replaced with the desired website name and its corresponding "frontend" name. You also can provide the choice of several different frontends from which to choose. To do so, just make sure to repeat the "client" radio <input> for each frontend.

After inserting the form code into your site and modifying the highlighted sections to correspond to your site and frontend, you are ready to serve up search results on your site using the Google Search Appliance.

NOTE: If you have a custom search results format for your frontend, it will be controlled by the "proxystylesheet" parameter in your form. In the sample form above, this parameter is hidden, so all search results will appear in whatever results format are defined for your frontend.

If you want the search results to appear differently depending on which frontend filter the user has chosen with the "client" radio input, you will need to implement something programatically on your site to make that happen (such as a small JavaScript routine that parses the value for the "client" option and sets the "proxystylesheet" input to the same value).