Python coded GoogleMini SAYT (Search As You Type) run on Google App Engine
Posted by bollysite on February 8th, 2010One of my client uses GoogleMini for search infrastructure. His entire site was coded in classic asp. I was hired for making some XSLT changes in frontend. GSA 6.0 has built in facility for query auto-completing. But googlemini doesn’t has such facility. So, Google Staff introduce SAYT (search as you type autocomplete) for googlemini and my client asked me to integrate SAYT with his googlemini. Google Mini SAYT is nothing but AJAX autocomplete script written in Javascript and PHP.
My client’s dedicated server is always heavily loaded with daily millions of page-views. So, SAYT was a kind of burden on his server by putting extra load as user keep sending request on every key stroke. Luckily I found Google App Engine, cloud computing infrastructure way cheaper as you can consume 1GB daily bandwidth free of cost. So then I converted GoogleMini SAYT php code into python and created a simple app engine code so we can host and run SAYT from Google Cloud Infrastructure.
# original file search-responder.php is Copyright (C) 2006 Google Inc. under Apache License, Version 2.0 at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
import os
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import util
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
from django.utils import simplejson
class RPCHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
self.response.headers["Content-Type"] = "text/html; charset=UTF-8"
self.response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache"
self.response.headers.add_header("Expires", "Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT")
# Get the data and the query
self.data = self.GetData()
self.query = self.request.get('query').strip().lower()
# Build Response
self.responseout = {}
self.responseout["query"] = self.query
self.responseout["results"] = self.GetResults()
if len(self.responseout["results"]) == 1:
self.responseout["autocompletedQuery"] = self.responseout['results'][0]['name']
# Output response
self.response.out.write("searchAsYouType.handleAjaxResponse(")
self.response.out.write(simplejson.dumps(self.responseout))
self.response.out.write(");")
def GetData(self):
data = []
data_index = 1
filedata = open("test-data.txt")
for line in filedata:
record = line.strip().split("|")
if len(record) == 4:
data.append(record)
return data
def GetResults(self):
results = []
data = self.data
queryLength = len(self.query)
for record in data:
if record[0].lower().find(self.query,0,queryLength) != -1:
result = {}
result['name'] = record[0]
result['type'] = record[1]
result['content'] = record[2]
result['moreDetailsUrl'] = record[3]
result['style'] = 'expanded' if self.query == record[0].lower() else 'normal'
results.append(result)
return results
def main():
application = webapp.WSGIApplication([('/rpc*', RPCHandler)], debug=True)
util.run_wsgi_app(application)
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
Save this code as search-responder.py file, and rest of work is similar to existing setup. Now to run this code from Google App Engine and modify your googlemini custom xslt frontend by these steps.
Note the step:-
<script src="http://localhost/sayt/search-as-you-type.js"></script>
<script>searchAsYouType.initialize(document.getElementById('sayt'), true);</script>
Modify with them with
<script src="http://your-app-engine-path/static_dir/search-as-you-type.js"></script>
<script>searchAsYouType.initialize(document.getElementById('sayt'), true);</script>
Save the Frontend XSLT and you are done.
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