Sunday, October 30, 2011

IMDb Search Suggestions with jQuery Autocomplete

In conjunction of my previous posts on IMDb Scraper API and jQuery Autocomplete with multiple search suggestions, on popular demand, I’ve created yet another search suggestion tool to fetch suggestions from IMDb.com. I’ve implemented a simple PHP Proxy script to get search suggestions from IMDb and format it according to jQuery Autocomplete Widget’s JSON data format.

For downloading and a guide to setup the suggestions tool on your website please visit the demo page on my labs section. You will need the suggest.php and imdbImage.php Proxy files for pulling content from IMDb.

Demo: http://lab.abhinayrathore.com/imdb_suggest/

IMDb’s suggestion API provides Title Name, Title Id, Cast, Type and Poster URL to display in the dropdown. You can customize the JavaScript code for your needs. IMDb has a leechers policy in place for media images so I’ve also included a PHP Proxy script to show IMDb Posters on search dropdown.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

jQuery Autocomplete with Multiple Search Engines

Search suggestions are one of the most important features people like to include on their sites as it minimizes the chances of typo errors and facilitate easy search my providing relevant suggestions in real time. I use a similar search suggestion tool on my personal dashboard page which works exactly like the Google suggest page. I thought of expanding it to include suggestions from multiple search engines so if I want to search some product on Amazon or some knowledge article on Wikipedia, it would get suggestions from all the engines at once. Here you can find an easy way to incorporate multiple search suggestions on your pages using jQuery and a small PHP script which combines the search suggestions.

Demo and Download: http://lab.abhinayrathore.com/autocomplete/

Search suggestion engines it can support out of the box are: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay.

For adding more suggestion engines, you can read the Configuration Options section on the page above. You can download the PHP script to combine multiple search suggestions from the link above.