RIP Kitchen Assistant, Long Live Kitchen Assistant!
Hmmmm… Seems like the CGI I was using to power the searches for my “Online Kitchen Assistant” went kaput sometime in October. Searches errored out as the new CGI code used by the guys at ResearchBuzz, whom I have shamelessly been using for almost 2 years, no longer accepts the older data format that I was still pushing. Looks like part of the reason there’s a new CGI at ResearchBuzz is that Google itself has started minimizing support for SOAP, which was the search framework it used to encourage web coders to use. Now it’s all AJAX, baby!
So I signed up for a free AJAX Search Engine API from Google for “cooking.schleppingsquid.net” and started hashing out the design. Turns out that the whole project to replace the old OKA took about 1.5 hours. I updated some of my target search sites (increasing the number of kosher and vegetarian recipe sites) and tweaked the results page look.
Sign up for a Google AJAX API: HERE
Raw version of my revamped Online Kitchen Assistant: HERE
Revamped embedded Online Kitchen Assistant: HERE
The only advice I can give, for those wanting to create their own custom search engine, is: make sure that you have a good list of sites already set for your engine to query against. I used 30+ kosher food, vegetarian and mixologist websites, as well as Wikipedia (for factoids to help fuel witty banter at a gathering you might have cooked or mixed for), as the backbone for all searches put through my custom search engine.
