Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

Can I automatically add words to a Google search?

I have a Google search box on my site, thanks to your article How to add Google Search to Your Site, but want to automatically add a few words to the search string that the user enters. Is that even possible? If so, how do I modify the JavaScript code to make it work?

Dave's Answer:

Great question, and one that's come up quite a few times since I wrote that original Google search code. Seems like it's popular to not only have a search box on your site, but to tweak the actual search that you send to Google. Who knew? :-)

Accomplishing this task, however, is quite a bit more complicated because what we have to do is actually tweak the form itself so that the word or words are grafted onto the search after the user has clicked the submit button but before the data is actually sent back to Google.

I asked a developer friend of mine, Luke Kingland, to help out and he describes his solution thusly:

"Instead of the user entering search terms directly into the "q" field that Google will read, we're going to have the user first enter their search terms into a temporary field named "custom_terms". The JavaScript that is then run when the user clicks "Submit" assembles the value for the "q" field (which is hidden) by setting it to both what the user typed in and the value of "additional_terms", which the site owner hard codes on the page."

Makes sense to me. Let me show you his solution. The first thing is that we now need a JavaScript function to assemble the different elements and send along the form itself. That needs to appear within the "<head>" of your Web page and looks like this:

That's the complicated part and I've marked in bold where you'd put in the word or words (use a "+" rather than a space if you specify a phrase) you want to have automatically added to the search.

Well, the form gets a bit of a tweak too:

<form id="search_form"
method="get"
action="http://www.google.com/search"
onsubmit="runsearch(this);return false;">
<input type="hidden" name="q" id="all_terms" />
<input type="text" id="custom_terms" class="display" name="display" size="25" />
<input type="submit" class="submit" value="Google Search" />
<div class="footer">
<input type="checkbox" name="sitesearch" value="askdavetaylor.com" checked="checked" />
<span> only search Ask Dave Taylor</span>
</div>
</form>

What's it look like? Let's check it out. I'll automatically add "help" to any search you enter below:

Cool, isn't it? Hope that's helpful to you!

Thanks to Luke Kingland over at Sigrun Labs for his help with this coding project.

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Categorized: CGI Scripts and Web Site Programming (Article 9206)
Tagged: google, javascript, web site programming
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Comments

Hi Dave,
Wish you a very happy new year.
I like the stuff here on this site. its amazing.
I have one query in regard with the above article -
Can we add certain "auto-suggest words" (may b more than 50) in google custom search?

Posted by: Salil Chaudhary at January 4, 2010 7:52 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!