I’d a question from a customer:

I’ve installed the updates on our dev server and I’m playing around with the [federated] search, I don’t suppose you know if there is a Google connector for the search? Or is there coding involved to get the Google search results?

That seemed funny to me – Google not presenting results in XML? Well, apparently not. Google do not appear to provide an OpenSearch XML results service – at least, not for general search. Curiously, Blogs and News searches do.

There was a SOAP API that could’ve been used, but they are no longer issuing developer keys. Looks like they’re closing it down.

The best solution I can find – several suggestions of creating an intermediate web service to parse standard page requests. Which was the line I was thinking down anyway (I love regexes – which is a bit freaky. They’re like Sudoku, but fun!)

I do think it’s strange that Google don’t offer an XML service – I do get why; they make their money from advertising. But the competition offer it; my reply to my customer did end with ‘Or you could just use Live Search’.