Configure Your Search Engine
Signing-in
Search Expander's search engine technology is only available to search engines and is by invitation only. If you run a search engine, please get in touch and we will create a free developer account for you.
Once we've created an account for you, you can sign in using the button at the top right of the page. You should then receive a magic link, which will enable you to sign in.
The "account" menu should now appear at the top of the page, which will give you access to your dashboard, search engines and user settings.
Dashboard
Reporting
From here, you can generate reports and view the number of requests you've made per day and see the corresponding cost per day.
New users will be set up with a developer account, which is limited to 1,000 requests per day. You will not be billed for your developer account. Once you are ready to go live with your changes, please contact us to arrange for a commercial account.
Users
You can add additional users under the Users section, allowing you to add other members of your team.
API key
Standard, client-side requests are made using Javascript and are authenticated by your search engine's domain and search engine ID. This provides a simple and effective method of authentication and is suitable for most search engines. However, private search engine owners who wish to proxy all their requests to our API will need to authenticate their requests using an API key. This can be obtained by here.
Once you switch to using a proxy, you can flick the switch to "Reject requests without API key", which will make for a more secure method of authentication.
Instructions on how to proxy your API requests can be found here.
Search Engines
From this section, you will be able to add search engines to your account, all of which can be configured differently. You will also need to allocate your domain(s) to each search engine you've created. If your search engine's domain has not been added, then any requests you make from your search engine will be rejected. You can add domains by clicking on the "+" icon next to each search engine.
Configuring your search engine
Click on the gear icon next to any search engine in your list to enter the configuration settings page and configure your search engine.
In the left-hand panel you will see all the configuration options. In the right-hand panel you will see a search preview (which uses Bing's search results). The search results can be previewed in either a desktop or mobile layout and you can also highlight Search Expander's data within the search results.
At a minimum, you will need to enter your search link URL template under the "Setup" drop-down section in the left-hand panel. This is the URL template for your search results page. Private search engine owners can also configure their search queries to use POST instead of GET requests. Instructions on how to implement that can be found here.
The rest of the configuration options allow you to make all sorts of changes to the way our data is displayed and allow you to switch different data sets on or off.
Private search engines
There is a drop-down section called "Private search engines" in the left hand menu, which contains some options specifically for private search engines. A status message here tells you if your search engine is private or not. We define “private” as any search engine that only makes calls to your search engine domain and ours (searchexpander.com). Our privacy policy is very robust and we do not set cookies, so this should ensure a private, cookie-free search experience for your users. However, there are additional settings listed here, should you also wish to proxy our assets and/or our API call. More instructions on that can be found here.
Implementing your changes
Once you've made your changes and you're happy with your search engine configuration, you will need to copy the code to your search results page for them to take effect, since all switches and configuration options are set client-side. (This also means that you can add them to your user settings page and have your users configure your search engine as they see fit.) Click on the "Example Javascript" drop down box to see a code example, which includes your configuration settings. However, this is just one example of how to implement your code - you can view many more examples in the next section here.
We suggest that you test your code on your test server before going live with it, especially if you are running a private search engine.
Demo site
We've created a demo site called SearchOmega, where you can see how Search Expander's API has been used to enhance a simple Google Programmable Search Engine.
We suggest you also view SearchOmega's html code and see how easy it is to implement our simple Javascript solution. You can find our demo site here...
