An exchange of emails with the UCSD library staff has given me some new insight into adapting UCSD’s Google search appliance to our web sites. The ‘proxystylesheet’ parameter can be set to the URL of a XSL file that is then used to style the appliance’s XML output. The search function on the UCSD Libraries page uses the following XSL file:

http://gort.ucsd.edu/itd/libraries_stylesheet.xsl

I haven’t tried developing an XSL file for the CCE search yet. I’m actually not sure if it is a better approach than the PHP wrapper approach I described in an earlier entry. The XSL file would have to be maintained separately from the CSS files that define our sites’ layout and appearance. This means that any time we made a change to the look and feel of a site, we’d have to duplicate that change in the XSL file. If anyone else has any thoughts on the pros and cons of the different approaches, I’d be interested to hear them.