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2007-05-14

LP Logo Position, AH Align Header

Some troubles with Google's custom search engines (CSE):
  • The watermark "branding" fails miserably with Javascript 1.1. The code doesn't check this old version resulting in garbage with browsers still using it. I always disable JS 1.1, but I can't ask visitors of pages using my "xyzzy" CSE to disable JS 1.1 before, they wouldn't know what it is. Now I use the ordinary "branding" with one of Google's six CSE logos.
  • The default position of the search form on the result page is "left" set by AH:left. Fans of the old free site search form know this "Align Header"  parameter, it's (kind of) documented on my lab page. It's also straight forward to modify it, add ;AH:center to the cof=FORID:0 parameter, where 0 might be something else depending on the used form.
  • The free site search result pages show my logo immediately above the search form. The used parameters L: for the logo URL and S: for the site URL are still the same for CSEs, it's only not more necessary to specify all these odd values as part of the cof= parameter, Google inserts them on the fly. Unfortunately it also uses some CSS magic (style sheets) to get this right, failing miserably with browsers not supporting CSS. After some experiments I found the culprit: There's a new LP:1 "Logo Position" , this has to be disabled by LP:0 to get the desired effect.
Putting it all together I ended up with this form input:
 <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:0;AH:center;LP:0" /> 
For an example see this form, I'll update the other forms later. Of course I'll need my own "googlet" for this CSE. But the normal "add to Google" CSE gadget is anyway far too big for my taste.

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There's no EX in ex-Wikiholic. Now having fun with the last days of Google+ and its self-proclaimed murderess.