Back from 2 weeks of holiday...

We've nearly completed the template site to which we can replicate in order to migrate our 70 affiliate sites into a single codebase, mult-site installation of Drupal (as per this page). One of the last bits of work is to get our Google Mini search appliance, which is fully-configured to search all of our sites and subcollections within our sites (thus, why we don't want - right now at least - to replace it as some of our sites and subsites will NOT be migrated to Drupal just yet), to work with our Drupal multi-site install.

Basically, our programmers simply took the Google Search Appliance module and tweaked to accommodate our subcollections and the configurations we have set in our Google Mini search appliance.

We made the following changes to the code of the Module:

modified google_appliance.module line 872 and followingDIFF:

REMOVED: $gm->setQueryPart('client', $client ? $client : variable_get('google_appliance_default_client', ''));

ADDED: $gm->setQueryPart('client', $collection ? $collection : variable_get('google_appliance_default_collection', ''));

ADDED: $gm->setQueryPart('restrict', $client ? $client : variable_get('google_appliance_default_client', ''));

We don't have it working perfectly yet but the basic setup seems to work. It required reassignment of some variables in order to properly handle our subcollections.

Once we get it fully-operations at a basic level (returning good, granular search results), we can then hopefully take further advantage of the above-mentioned modules' other features including meta-tag contstraints, the setting and theming of meta-tags, various display options for results, caching options as well as what seem to be many many great theming options, which has been a big sticking point with the way we currently use the Google Mini - we can't get the search results page to work with our Dreamweaver template to display the results the way we want them. Annoying. This Drupal module seems like it might help in this regard.

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