How can I do a search with Google Custom Search API for .NET?

Question

I just discovered the Google APIs Client Library for .NET, but because of lack of documentation I have a hard time to figure it out.

I am trying to do a simple test,

Answer 1

First of all, you need to make sure you've generated your API Key and the CX. I am assuming you've done that already, otherwise you can do it at those locations:

• API Key (you need to create a new browser key)
• CX (you need to create a custom search engine)

Once you have those, here is a simple console app that performs the search and dumps all the titles/links:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    WebClient webClient = new WebClient();

    string apiKey = "YOUR KEY HERE";
    string cx = "YOUR CX HERE";
    string query = "YOUR SEARCH HERE";

    string result = webClient.DownloadString(String.Format("https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key={0}&cx={1}&q={2}&alt=json", apiKey, cx, query));
    JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
    Dictionary collection = serializer.Deserialize>(result);
    foreach (Dictionary item in (IEnumerable)collection["items"])
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Title: {0}", item["title"]);
        Console.WriteLine("Link: {0}", item["link"]);
        Console.WriteLine();
    }
}

As you can see, I'm using a generic JSON deserialization into a dictionary instead of being strongly-typed. This is for convenience purposes, since I don't want to create a class that implements the search results schema. With this approach, the payload is the nested set of key-value pairs. What interests you most is the items collection, which is the search result (first page, I presume). I am only accessing the "title" and "link" properties, but there are many more than you can either see from the documentation or inspect in the debugger.