How to save search queries on Google Custom Search Engine

Maurizio Petrone — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 18:07:50 +0000

Does anybody out there run a Google Custom Search Engine?

Still wondering how to save your user’s search queries?

If you host yourself your own CSE, and your server can run PHP/MySQL, here is the solution!

First of all, you have to set up a MySQL table where the search terms searched on your Google Custom Search Engines will be saved: to do so, open your favourite MySQL frontend (like PhpMyAdmin), and run this query:

CREATE TABLE `query` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `query` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '', `datetime` int(11) NOT NULL default '0', PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM

Done? Well. Now, open the page in which you pasted the Google’s code that displays search results, and add to that page the code that will save data: it grabs search term from the URL:

< ?php /*----------------------- First part: db connection -------------------------*/ $dbhost = "localhost"; $dbname = "mylittledb"; $dbuser = "root"; $dbpass = "password"; $db=mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass); if ($db==FALSE) die("Error while connecting to MYSQL ".mysql_error()); mysql_select_db($dbname ,$db); /*------------------------------ Read and save the search query -------------------------------*/ $querystat = mysql_real_escape_string($_GET['q']); $datetime = time(); if( ($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] == '') AND ( ($querystat != $_SESSION['prev_search']) OR ( ($datetime - $_SESSION['datetime']) > 60) ) ) { $insertquery = "INSERT INTO `query` ( `query` , `datetime`) VALUES ( '$querystat' , '$datetime');"; mysql_query($insertquery, $db); } $_SESSION['datetime'] = $datetime; $_SESSION['prev_search'] = $querystat; ?>

That’s all.

This code saves also the time/date of each search, so you can may later analyze searches e.g. per day, per month, or per time period.

Example’d code saves queries only if the referer is blank (i.e. the user did not request the search results page clicking on a link to it, but he has to manually submit the form), and it prevents multiple page refreshes (a minute at least has to pass, or the search query has to be different, before the term is saved into database).

If you don’t want filters, and you want to save right every query, keep just the database connection and the two lines inside the IF statement for the second part.

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Cascading Style Sheet Switcher

Maurizio Petrone — Tue, 23 May 2006 11:30:55 +0000

This code snippet will allow your users to choose between different styles to apply to your website.
Yes, it’s a PHP skin selector for websites!

~~You can view a live example of it in this weblog itself: it’s the switch style icon on the top right corner (Click it right now!).~~
Due to an heavy layout restyling, this function is no longer available on my blog. Sorry for the inconvenience

Here is a little presentation of the features that this little code provides:

Have a default style (in absence of previous choices)
Unlimited choices (depending on your fantasy and ability)
Style choose take effect immediately, and site-wide
Switcher link brings you back to the page you were seeing, but restyled
The preference is saved for each user, for successive visits

And now, let’s explain the technique.

Before diving directly into the code, I like to spend some words on the idea behind the switcher.

The main thing we do is printing links to different CSS files into our page HTML section, depending on what we read from a cookie.

Why CSS files?

There are several advantages with having your site presentation and style informations stored into a separate CSS file, instead of having them embedded directly into the markup.

Without listing all of them, I just say that you can vary the look & feel of a whole site by changing only a single line of code – that one that tells us the name and the path of CSS file.

What I need?

An (X)HTML output for your website (ok, you already got it); two or more CSS files applicable to that markup output; a server that can run PHP; and a client that can save cookies!

For multiple pages, it would be useful to have a template-driven output, so you don’t have to change every single page section, but only the template one.

Please note: the more standard, well-formed and separated from presentation your markup code is, the more effective and powerful this technique will be.
(XHTML Strict, without any embedded style information, is the best.)

How it works?

Ok, do you have at least two CSS files for your markup? Let’s switch ‘em!

First of all, change the line that display the link to your CSS with something like this:

.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />

Substantially, you have to change the CSS filename (without its extension) with the echo of $style variable on PHP.

To fill this variable with a valid value (that is an existing CSS file name in the specified path), put this code immediately before the previous line:

if(isset($_COOKIE['style'])){
$style=$_COOKIE['style'];
} else {
$style=’default’; //the name of default style file
}
?>

With these lines, we control if there’s a cookie named STYLE, then assign its value to $style, else we assign a default value to that variable.
I guess that you already know what comes next…

The last thing to do is to write a script that will write a custom value (that is CSS name) in our cookie, and then send the client back to the page it was on before calling that script.

Create an empty file called switch.php and fill it with the following:

header(”Location:”.$HTTP_SERVER_VARS["HTTP_REFERER"]);
?>

You can call it from any page with a link like this:

View page with Default style!
View page with Alternate style!