Searching Google using SMS

Want to just search the Web for something? This last recipe will let you do just that. This recipe will let us use the "search" keyword to trigger a search in Google and return the top three search results.

To do this, we're going to build a Custom Search Engine and also use Google's API.

Getting ready

The complete source code for this recipe can be found in the Chapter5/ folder.

How to do it...

And now, the big one. We will now add Google search to our local search system.

  1. Get your Google API key from https://code.google.com/apis/console.
  2. Go to http://www.google.com/cse/ and create a Custom Search Engine. We want it to search the entire Internet, so make sure you do the following:
    • In the Sites to Search field, feel free to enter any domain; we will delete it later
    • Head to the Setup tab under Edit search engine. In the Sites to Search drop-down list, select Search the entire web but emphasize included sites
    • Select the domain name that you entered on the list and delete it

    Now you have a Custom Search Engine that searches the entire web. Be sure to copy the CX parameter from your URL; we will be using this later

  3. Download the Google API Client for PHP from https://code.google.com/p/google-api-php-client/.
  4. Unzip the folder and upload it to your web server.
  5. Upload search.php to your pages folder and add the following code to it:
    <?php
require_once 'google-api-php-client/src/Google_Client.php';
require_once 'google-api-php-client/src/contrib/Google_CustomsearchService.php';
session_start();
$client = new Google_Client();
$client->setApplicationName('My Google SMS Search tool'),
$client->setDeveloperKey('Your Developer Key Here'),
$search = new Google_CustomsearchService($client);
$result = $search->cse->listCse($keywords, array(
  'cx' => 'YOUR CUSTOM SEARCH ENGINE CX HERE',
  'num'=> '3',
));
if( count($results['items']) ){
  $msg = array();
  foreach($results['items'] as $item){
          $msg[] = $item['title']." ".$item['link']);
  }
  print_sms_reply( $msg );
}else{
  print_sms_reply("No matches found");
}

    Replace Your Developer Key Here with the developer key you got from the Google API console, and replace YOUR CUSTOM SEARCH ENGINE CX HERE with the CX code we told you to copy in step 2.

How it works

In step 1, we set up our Google API key. In step 2, we created our own Custom Search Engine.

In step 3, we downloaded the Google API key for PHP; in step 4, we uploaded the folder to our web server. Step 5 saw us create our search.php file in our pages folder, which lets us perform Google searches from our phones via SMS.

This API look up uses the Google Custom Search Engine API to search the Internet for you. When you text "search" and a keyword, it will return the top three search results for that keyword.

We're using Google's API Client for PHP to do the hard work for this search because it's already set up for us. It's quick and works well.

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