How to search from many GAE datastore? Is it possible to use Search API?

Question

I want to create search interface to search data from GAE datastore? Can i use Google Search API to search this way?

Answer 1

GAE's datastore doesn't really offer much in terms of full-text search (the kind that Google Search implements on webpages) -- there's a conceptual example, but it doesn't scale up well, is barely documented, etc.

You can try something like this example (in Java -- you don't specify in your Q if you want to use Java or Python in your app), or this one (in Python), but they're more like proof-of-concept (and quite instructive, admittedly) than fully-ready productionized components. nonrel-search seems more mature but it constrains you to Django.

For a completely different approach, which does take advantage of the search engines' capabilities and APIs: if you can arrange all of your data so it can be presented into "documents" (pages generated when your URLs are queried), and write a sitemaps generator that guarantees to generate all the relevant URLs, then you can submit your sitemap to all search engines (including Google, of course) -- they'll reap and index your data, and then you can use their search APIs as you desire (including e.g. the site:whatever.appspot.com constraint in the Google search, of course;-).