Searching with links

Searching a website with a text link

[Daniel02]

Hello all,

I'm not really sure where to post this question, but because I'm a newbie I'll just post it here....

I've created a website with a series of custom search engines (e.g. cseA, cseB, cseC, cseD). In many cases a user will want to search the same keyword in more than one of the search engines (but they should not be combined). Right now if a user searches "keyword" in cseA and then wants to search "keyword" in cseB then the user has to click my link to go to the cseB homepage and then retype "keyword". I'd like to set it up so that once "keyword" is searched in cseA, if the user wants to search it in cseB then the user clicks the link for cseB and "keyword" is immediately searched.

I know this is a little confusing so I'll give an example: In google if one searches "london" for the general web search and then on the results page clicks "images" then one is immediately taken to an image search of "london", rather than the google images homepage. This is what I'm looking to achieve.

Thanks,
Daniel

[brotherhood of LAN]

A server side scripting language, like PHP or ASP would do the job, it would populate the URL's with the $query_words required to do the same search on 'images', 'news' etc.

In the Google example, where "q" is the query submitted, PHP can access whatever is put into the search form with the variable $_GET['q'], which you then use for your purpose.

[Daniel02]

Thanks. I have no experience coding PHP/ASP, so I'm imagining something like this is too tough for me to learn relatively quickly? Is this the sort of thing I could find a downloadable script for?

Thanks again.

[brotherhood of LAN]

For this task it's relatively easy.

You'd have something like <a href="http://www.example.com/?q=<?php echo $_GET['q']; ?>">Image Search</a>

The PHP is embedded in your HTML and emboldened

[Daniel02]

What url would I put where you wrote "example"? The way I've arranged the search engines they have their 'search pages' and their 'results pages'. So it's like

cseA search: www.site.com
cseA results: www.site.com/results
cseB search: www.site.com/images
cseB results: www.site.com/image-results

Do I include the "cseB search" or "cseB results" url? And just copy/pasting the code you gave me should work?

Thanks again,
Daniel