GSearch

Markbnj

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A little side-project that sprang from my work on the GMemory game a few weeks back is GSearch, a class library for executing Google searches from .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2 managed code.

The library encapsulates the full range of Google search services, meaning blogs, books, images, locations, news stories, patents, video, and web pages. The search methods are very easy to use, and there is a full compiled class reference included with the distributions. Additionally there is a readme.txt with each distro giving some basic usage examples.

The library comes in two versions: one for .NET 3.5 and a second for Silverlight 2. The source code distro includes solutions, projects, and source to build both libs as well as the class references.

The libraries are structured around a core engine (GSearch.Core.dll) that is about 21k in size, and a set of search-specific assemblies that range in size from 9k to 15k. You only need to reference and distribute the core and the specific search types you use, so the overhead for, say, searching images can be as small as 30k. I am planning to add a unified engine that handles all the search types and responds through a unified event interface at some point.

The .NET runtime distro also includes GSearchPad, a .NET 3.5/WPF example application that will let you execute any of the search types with custom arguments and display the results. Source for this is included with the source distro as well.

You can get all three packages and read some other comments here: GSearch - Google Search for .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 2.

Give it a try, and let me know if you find any issues!

Edit: someone on another forum suggested setting it up on Codeplex, so I have done that. You can access the project page here.
 

Markbnj

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Thanks, man! :). It will be interesting to see if anyone finds it useful. I kind of get a kick out of integrating Internet services into little applets and things, and I suspect we'll see more of that, so maybe this will find a niche.
 

Train

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I'm totally digging this and Gmemory, good job Mark.

This might actually prod me to finnaly start playing with silverlight dev.
 

Markbnj

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Thanks :). I appreciate the feedback. I'm working on another, slightly more ambitious Silverlight project now. Hope to post something in a few days. One enhancement I have in mind for GSearch is to provide a weakly-typed interface through which you can handle all the search types, casting the response object on return as needed. Might get to that next week.