Site.com has many good built in features and Salesforce.com continues to add more and more functionality with each release. Google offers a custom search service that can be added to websites to give them search functionality. This article describes how Site.com can be configured to use Google’s custom search to provide a search box and search results page for a Site.com site. The first part of the article describes what must be done inside of the Google Control Panel. The second part describes what must be done in Site.com
There are two versions of custom search. The free version is Custom Search Engine and it doesn’t allow as much visual customization and is ad supported. The paid version is Google Site Search and it supports more visual customization, can be ad free, and also grants access to an XML API. The differences between the two are outlined here. I used the free version for this article, but the same configurations can be done in the paid version.
Once you have an account you can create a search engine and manage it through the Control Panel.
The look and feel must be changed from the default to a two page layout so that the search results are shown on their own page. That can be done by clicking on the Look and feel sidebar menu item and selecting the two page layout.
After the layout selection has been made, the code needs to be generated. Eventually, you’ll need to copy the code into your Site.com site. The Look and feel page has a Save & Get Code button which takes you directly to the page to get the code, or from the Setup page there is a Get Code button. There are two code snippets to copy. The first is the code for the search box and the second is the code for the search results page. The JavaScript for the search box will look something like the following:
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<script> (function() { var cx = '9996191898888888888882:n15qjjj4hsw'; var gcse = document.createElement('script'); gcse.type = 'text/javascript'; gcse.async = true; gcse.src = (document.location.protocol == 'https:' ? 'https:' : 'http:') + '//www.google.com/cse/cse.js?cx=' + cx; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(gcse, s); })(); </script> <gcse:searchbox-only></gcse:searchbox-only> |
Note that the generated element has -only in it: <gcse:searchbox-only>. Make sure it is not <gsce:searchbox> as that is what is used in a one page layout. An attribute named resultsUrl which indicates the URL of your search results page needs to be added to the <gcse:searchbox-only> element if it isn’t already there. The above <gcse-searchbox-only> tag would be altered to something like the following, where the search results page for your site would be specified instead.
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<gcse:searchbox-only resultsUrl=“http://mysitedotcomsite.com/SearchResultsPage”></gcse:searchbox-only> |
The code for the search results page will look something like the following:
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<script> (function() { var cx = '9996191898888888888882:n15qjjj4hsw'; var gcse = document.createElement('script'); gcse.type = 'text/javascript'; gcse.async = true; gcse.src = (document.location.protocol == 'https:' ? 'https:' : 'http:') + '//www.google.com/cse/cse.js?cx=' + cx; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(gcse, s); })(); </script> <gcse:searchresults-only></gcse:searchresults-only> |
Note that the element has -only in it just like the <gcse:searchbox-only> element.
More on the searchbox-only and searchresults-only tags can be found in the Google documentation for those elements.
Site.com Pages
The search box JavaScript should be placed in a Custom Code block in a Page Template so that all descendant pages will automatically have it. After you create the Page Template, simply add a Custom Code block and paste the first code snippet (i.e., the <gsce:searchbox-only> code snippet) into it. You will get a warning message about badly formed HTML “Inserting badly formed HTML could corrupt your site. If you’re sure you want to continue, click OK.”. You should click OK to ignore it. The layout of the Page Template is pictured below.
Make sure that the section of the page (e.g., div#content) where the search results Code Block will be placed in the search results page is editable in the Page Template. Create a search results Page from the Page Template and add a Custom Code Block to it. Paste the second code snippet (i.e., the <gsce:search-results-only> code snippet) into it. The layout of the search results Page is pictured below.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file can be used to let search engines know what should be indexed for search on the site. You can upload a robots.txt file as an asset to the root directory and it will be used. Note that you cannot use the robots.txt in a Developer Edition org. The Developer Edition orgs are not meant to be searched and Salesforce has its own robots.txt at the root that disallows everything.
Testing
You may want to configure the look and feel and test everything before you publish and before you want Google indexing the pages on your site. In the Google Control Panel, you can change the site that is being searched to a different public site. For example, I changed my custom search to www.peterknolle.com in the Google Control Panel.
By changing that, I was able to see actual search results on my search results page in my Developer Edition.
Additional
There are many more options offered by Google that allow you to customize the look and feel, the layout, and the search behavior. Google also has an API that allows you to obtain the search results in an XML format for maximum flexibility. Refer to the documentation from Google for more information.
Hi Peter,
I was wondering if you may be able to help me out with a simple question regarding site.com and making sure my site is not searchable by any search engine. The article is great in the instance that you want/need google to find your site but what if we want our site and VF page to remain hidden from all searches, how do we do this? Can we simply not include a robot.txt file or do we have to call something out in the robot.txt file to exclude this page? Sorry i’m an admin not a developer. If this is the wrong forum to ask this question I apologize.
Thanks
You have to specify Disallow for the page(s) you do not want to be indexed by the search engines. You can use a wildcard to denote more than one page or even the whole site. This webmaster page from Google has more info.
This will not secure your pages from outside access though. Someone could still go directly to the page if they have the URL for it. The major search engines are programmed to follow these directives, but from a technical standpoint there’s nothing stopping them other than that they are programmed that way.
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Good article Peter! Custom code blocks allow saving of badly formatted html but visualforce does enforce this restriction making it impossible to save a file with the <gsce:searchbox tag. Have you found another way to embed the version 2 component into a visualforce page. Know this solution exists but it references v1 of the Google Custom Search Element. https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewSolution?id=000170682&language=en_US
Thank you!
To follow up.. was able to achieve the v2 of the Google search by injecting the <gcse: tag into the page at runtime.
Search Page
var gcseDiv = document.getElementById(‘gsearch’);
gcseDiv.innerHTML = ”
(function() {
var cx = ‘youGoogleKey’;
var gcse = document.createElement(‘script’);
gcse.type = ‘text/javascript’;
gcse.async = true;
gcse.src = (document.location.protocol == ‘https:’ ? ‘https:’ : ‘http:’) +
‘//cse.google.com/cse.js?cx=’ + cx;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(gcse, s);
})();
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