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Does anyone have a free case study / example notes / working papers on implementing customized front ends for a GSA (Google Search Appliance 7007)?

I am an application programmer that has been newly charged with "fixing" the UX for our intranet searches. Not finding any detailed info on how to get the XML into something shiny and fast. What the GSA wizard makes looks "ok" to me and is fairly functional. Advice on where to go besides Google's own GSA website, or a specific page in there, on the structure of the XML, and how the wizard settings may affect it, would be much appreciated.

I can try to puzzle out the lovely 2-3 char tags - but is there a mapping from that to english somewhere ?

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Welcome to UX, marcella! This website is for questions about UX research and design, and development questions are unfortunately not part of the scope. – Vitaly Mijiritsky Feb 16 '12 at 9:06

closed as off topic by Vitaly Mijiritsky Feb 16 '12 at 9:06

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2 Answers

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I've been working with the GSA XSLT frontends for over 3 years, in my experience it is really hard to make the XSLT really 'shiny' due to the fact that there is so much boilerplate to cut through (9145 lines to be exact). However it is fast off the box because it gets cached. The main problem is that once you've mastered (most) of the XSLT, when it comes time to upgrade software versions you may have templated yourself into a corner, unable to take advantage of new features (my current situation).

It is therefore my recommendation that if you really want control over the presentation layer, get familiar with the Search Protocol Reference aka the XML response you get back when you remove the proxystylesheet parameter from a search URL. Use this and build your application around it with whatever framework/language you are comfortable with; the XML changes less, has no cruft, and you have ultimate flexibility to modularly build around it with other informational feeds. If you have additional questions about the XML structure you can always hit up the Google Group.

Finally, there needs to be a better 3rd party open source solution to crafting more responsive UX for the GSA. If I get some free time perhaps I'll prototype something that attacks this issue, would be a fun project.

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I have a PDF directly from Google that talks about working with XSLTs and what specifically you can modify.

The info may be dated, since I last worked on a GSA implementation in 2007. Enjoy!

Let me know if you are able to download it:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1vJFgiv7ODOYjE0MGI0MGQtYzgyZi00MjRiLWIwYTMtODI0NTdmM2VlYzc3

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