How do I add an Ask.Com seach box to my Web site?

Apparently one great benefit of learning the arcane hypertext markup language (HTML) is that I can crack open Web pages, figure out how the scripts on those pages work and rewrite them to appear on other Web pages or web sites. It's actually kind of a fun little puzzle, but I wouldn't admit that in public lest it make me sound like a bit of a geek. :-)

Anyway, the first step is to bring up a page with the search box you want. In the case of Ask.com I suggest that you start with the search box at the top of a search results page, since it's simpler code than their fancy home page.

When I searched for actor Johnny Depp, it looks like this:

The source code is accessible by choosing View --> Page Source in Firefox or similar in whatever browser you use.

The source is a jumble of complex codes and scripts, as is common on modern sites, but underneath all of that is the core functionality of the search box. When you dig through it, however, you find that the way that they've implemented the search suggestions script means that you can't just extract the form HTML elements and have a functional script. Too bad.

Instead, we'll have to reverse engineer the URL that's produced on a search.

The page that I show above, for example, has the complicated URL:

Unwrapped this means that we have a bunch of variable=value pairs:

• q=johnny+depp
• search=search
• qsrc=0
• o=0
• l=dir

This gives us the following URL: http://www.ask.com/web?q=johnny+depp.

Click on it and see what happens.

It works!

Nice. This means that the Ask.com search box is incredibly simple:

Easy enough!

Now that you have the most basic search box you can jazz it up with some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) code if you'd like, to make it a bit more fun:

Which looks like this:

Try it if you'd like. It works!