Redirecting search results into an ASP.NET page

Question

I've an ASP.NET page with a textbox and a option from user of the following choices: Wikipedia, Google, Dictionary.com, Flickr, Google images.

The user enters a word(s) in the textbox and selects a choice among the following.

Depending on the choice select by the user I wish to return the following.

Wikipedia: Return the content and link to the page corresponding to the topic about the word.
Google: Return the top 10 results of google search for this word.
Flickr: Return a few images atmost 10 images from flickr search
GoogleImage: Return a few images from google image search.
Dictionary: Return the meaning of the word.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Have an iframe within your page, and then set the src of the frame to the appropriate query string that you craft from the user's input.

This can be done from javascript within the page, in response to the user selecting something in the 'choice' dropdown. You can have the appropriate urls already embedded in the javascript (as variables), and just substitute in the user's input.

Answer 2

Since you are wanting to do some processing on the results prior to displaying them, your best bet is probably to invoke a web request on the server to fetch your results as RSS or some other parsable XML format.

So first up, we have Wikipedia, which has API support for open search, and queries with XML or JSON output. You can get the details of the API by going to: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php I would think either the query action, or opensearch action would be what you want.

Right, now there is Google, which supports search results as RSS through their Active Search feature. The link takes you to the main page where you can build the query, at which point it should be easy to drop in your search terms. There is also the Google Search AJAX API, which you can find out about here (See the "Flash and other Non-Javascript Environments" section for building the URLs directly. I believe this option should give you access to Google Image results as well.

For Flickr, have a look at this App Garden page. There are several output formats available to choose from.

I wasn't able to find anything real solid on getting results from Dictionary.com, but it does appear that they have an API. You might be able to dig through google and find some references on how to get search results as XML or JSON. There are also several other Dictionary sites which may have more information about their APIs. While searching I managed to find this SO question about word lookup from google dictionary.

Hope this helps.