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May 13, 2007

Google Gadgets in Your Search Results

Google Subscribed Links are a way to build your own OneBox results, by defining direct answers for a list of queries. For example, you could check the status of a flight or find a book if you know the ISBN by entering a simple query.


Now the subscribed links can have a richer interface by including Google gadgets. You can't add inline gadgets or built-in gadgets like the preview of Gmail's inbox, but the good news is that your gadget can access the query and display something relevant.

A good example of gadget that's now included in a subscribed link is Google Translate. After subscribing to the gadget, you can translate some text directly from Google's search box. A query like [translate "I love you" to German] will trigger a direct answer.


This could be used to show search results from other search engines, the latest posts from a blog, solve complicated equations, show relevant photos from your Flickr albums and more.

2 comments:

  1. German: Could not retrieve translation. Google Translate service may be unavailable due to high traffic. Please try again later.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, the gadget uses screen scraping, so Google might block it if you use it too often.

    ReplyDelete

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