by Jason Salas, KUAM News Thursday, August 05, 2004 Subscribe to Jason's newsfeed   E-mail this article Printable version KUAM Toolbar Web Widgets Get RSS headlines

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One of the more popular things any large Web site can have is powerful search capability. Letting users selectively filter through your content is one of the critical factors that can either make or break your site's success. Here at KUAM.COM, we've been doing a significant amount of work with our search tools, refining and rewriting them to help you find precisely the KUAM News stories that interest you, with minimal effort and rapid results.

We told you previously about the overhaul we did of KUAM Search back in June, and soon after we introduced our date-specific search tool, KUAM Rundown Search. And just this week, I demonstrated how you can tap KUAM's newsfeeds using RSS aggregators.

We're now happy to release the first distant-end search utility that lets you access the latest Guam news headlines - without needing to browse to our site at all! Our new developer tool empowers your projects with a cool feature - a utility that lets users search Guam news via KUAM.COM on your pages or within their own desktop applications! Your company's IT guy could write a simple little Windows program that grabs certain stories each morning to run within your intranet of workgroup program, without you ever needing to get out on the Web. Or, if you're a student working on a project, you can add a simple form that searches the KUAM News Archives to add to a research project.

It's very flexible...and very cool!

In the past you could add a search form on your site, but you'd still need to reference the host of the company at some point, meaning you'd need to ultimately use their pages, and be forced to rely on users leaving your site. In desktop environments, this can be somewhat of a security concern for many network managers. You're now able to develop your own client applications and include KUAM Search results directly into them and have total carte blanche over how they're used.

This type of utility is becoming more and more popular with large, content-rich Web sites, with similar offerings from Amazon.com and Google.

If you're a developer the following is for you: just create a reference to our Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file, check out the service documentation, call the function that suits your app best, and embed the resultset within your project. You'll get the results to load domestically within your application, regardless if you're working with a Web, desktop, mobile or console app, using a cross-transport Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) payload and being callable through HTTP-POST, HTTP-GET, or HTTP-SOAP.

Our web service contains WebMethods that return either a strongly-typed, tabular DataSet for .NET clients, or serialized XML for remote calls made through applications running Java, PHP or using the client-side XML Document Object Model (DOM).

Drop me a line if you get stuck, I'd be happy to help you out. Happy programming!