Published in Application Programming Interfaces on Thursday, November 17th, 2005
Similar to the Google Search API, MSN uses SOAP to transfer data to and from it's server. Here we have a look at building a site search with the MSN Search API.
The last two articles in this series have looked at the Yahoo! and Google search APIs. The Google and MSN APIs both use SOAP, and the process for acquiring data is quite similar, therefore this instalment will be an overview of using the MSN API, and will look a lot like the Google article.
Like the other search APIs, MSN provides a development kit from the MSN Search homepage in their development center.
You can apply for an application key from this page by clicking Configure Applications Create and Manage Application IDs. You will need a Microsoft Passport to get your the key.
As with the other articles, we will be focusing on the Search API to build a site search. We will be taking input, in the form of search terms from a user, and building a request that we will send to the API server. We will then take the response, unserialize it and format the results into some html.
MSN uses the SOAP protocol (specs, W3Schools, Wikipedia) for sending data between it's API server and your application. PHP 5 can handle SOAP natively, however for PHP 4 we need to use an external library to send, receive, and unserialize our communications (sound familiar?). In this example, I've chosen to use NuSOAP. You may also want to check out the PEAR SOAP class.
The first thing we need to do is build a request to send to the MSN server. We will do this by setting our search parameters in an array:
Notice that the parameter array is a bit more complex than in the previous two examples. Details about the structure of the request can be found in the help file that comes with the Developer kit.
In order to make a site search, a couple of things need to take place.
Query in our array above.site:www.yoursite.com must be embedded into the value for q. Taking into account those two points, the line for Query would be
'Query' => 'site:www.yoursite.com search terms'.
This next part moves quite fast, condensing a few of the steps done in last weeks Yahoo! example into simply a few lines of code. Rather than opening a file with PHP, we will be passing the url and the parameters directly to the nusoap class:
First we include the class, then we instantiate a new 'soapclient', passing it the URI for the API server. From this point we can call the server as outlined in the example.
Nusoap returns the data from the server to us in the form of an array. Compared to the example from last week, this was certainly much simpler to get from the request to an array of data (granted, nusoap is composed of a lot of lines of code, and it did all of the heavy lifting).
If you were to print_r($searchresults) at this point, you would see something similar to the following:
Looking at the array above, we can see that the total number of search results can be taken from $searchresults['Responses']['SourceResponse']['Total'], and that our results are held in $searchresults["Responses"]["SourceResponse"]["Results"]. Each of those elements holds a result, with the associated title, description, url and an MSN cache url. Further down, you can find the search query and the start index, among some other details.
Now that the data is held in an array, it will be quite easy to loop thru the $searchresults["Responses"]["SourceResponse"]["Results"] array and present the data however you see fit. I won't elaborate an example here, but in the downloadable code at the bottom an example is given.
This is the third search API that has been examined, and if you have followed the series, you will notice that this article basically carries over most of the instructions from the Google article. They both use SOAP to communicate, and the only difference can be found in the parameters and the structure of the result array. MSN does offer access to many more queries per day, 10,000 search results per site.
Here is an example script that pulls this whole article together. When using, remember:
As usual, questions or comments invited below. Next week we move away from search APIs, to something perhaps a little more useful if you happen to have a blog that is more then a year and a half old...
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