Search from any XHTML-capable browsing device!

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google Enterprise

We're always excited when a developer, customer, or partner takes such great interest in our products and in our community that they spend the time and effort to contribute their own improvements. I've recently had the pleasure of working with software engineer and web standards aficionado Joe D'Andrea who has made it his personal mission to take our Google Search Appliance into the wonderful world of web standards compliance. He's created a new XSLT stylesheet that displays our search results in a way that conforms to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 specifications. In doing so he's completely separated the markup from the styling in our default stylesheet.

What does this mean to you? Well for starters it means that you could install this single stylesheet into your Google Search Appliance and provide a search experience that automatically adapts to the device its being viewed on! On a computer screen Joe provides the familar look we all love. On printed paper the astute eye notices some added conveniences. What about a mobile phone? Ok, now we're talking. The drastic transformation into a Google Mobile-like interface seems like magic. But thats nothing. Go ahead and try your favorite text-based or speech-based browser! Ah, there's nothing quite like having your search results read to you like poetic verse...

Read more about the many other benefits in Joe's own blog post. He's published the stylesheet, along with lots of screenshots and notes, as a project on Google's open source hosting platform.

If you would like to contribute to our growing list of open source projects related to our Enterprise products, drop us a note and let us know what interesting things you're working on!

Thanks Joe!