Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Google in the past has allowed people to add a lot of interactivity to their individual web sites. You could display video, news and local search results on your web page without writing any code.

Google released their latest wizard which generates a news bar that scrolls through recent news headlines. The News Bar is a Google AJAX Search API  application that lets you easily add application and page-controled news search results to your web pages or blog. This control, which provides search-driven bars of news results, is highly customizable: you can specify the news bar’s orientation, the number of results it displays, the list of search expressions that drive it, etc. You can control which news results it displays through both APIs, and if you like, through links on your page (e.g., The Dow, OPEC, Iraq.)

Here, I’ve customized it to show Google News search results for Google.

This news bar is also available in a vertical orientation for you to use in a column or your wordpress sidebar. You can also easily change the look-and-feel of the wizard-generated code just by adding some CSS or editing the JavaScript.

Where can you use this?

Say, you have seperate categories on your site about say Apple, Microsoft or Google or any other companies, you can use this code on those pages generating news related to that news topic or company

The wizards allow you to easily implement some of Google’s most popular solutions based on the AJAX Search API. The other wizards besides the News Bar Wizard offered by Google include

1. Google Map Search Wizard where you can allow your users to search for places on a Google map without leaving your site.

2. Google Video Bar Wizard allows you to embed Google Videos on your blog or website

3. Google Video Search Wizard allows your users to search for videos and watch ones you have selected without leaving your site

4. Google Book Bar Wizard allows you to show off books on topics that interest you on your web site or blog.

Additional Sources:

If you wish to further customize this Google News Bar, Google has provided us with a News Bar Programming Guide