So last night I created something I was plotting to do for a while.  A search page for myself that does both the google and live search engines.  I'm hosting it over at Peace Love Code at http://www.peacelovecode.com/search/.  Updated:  Source Code posted at peacelovecode.com.

Now why did I do this?  To prove live's engine is better?  No.  I did it cause I did google searches before working at Microsoft a lot.  It is built into muscle memory.  I'm at google before I even know what hit me.  This was a cool way for me to see which engine gives ME better results.  I search for weird stuff, technical stuff dealing with computer languages and reverse engineering query string variables that are cryptic but deal with what I'm doing.

Smooth as silk Successes:

• Dealing with the Live API's was easy.  Live's API allows me to do paging and return between 1 and 50 results unlike ...
• Going from postbacks to ASP.Net Ajax callbacks are super easy.  One might as ... too easy.
• I remembered how to do code without touching it for a few months.  I demand a cookie for doing this.

Problems:

• UTF8 is evil.
• The Google Ajax results is a hack using their Ajax search results.  Who knows how long they will allow this to work like this.  They can change it and break what I'm doing at any time.
• Reverse engineering objects from JSON is hard.
• Finding the api key for Live Search was a bit harder than I thought.  Microsoft calls it an AppID.  It can be found at http://search.msn.com/developer.
• Google's wasn't exactly a walk in the park either if you don't enter through the front door (I didn't).  Their signup can be found http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/signup.html.
• Google's Ajax Search results only give me 8 results back.  I don't think there is a way to page the results also.
• Using ASP.Net Ajax, I couldn't fire off 2 Ajax requests side by side it seemed like.  I know there is some way to do it, I just don't know how ... yet.  This is for the "Search" button.  I want both panes to update independently.
• I couldn't do a straight port of the app to ASP.Net Ajax, I know if I actually searched for this, I'd be able to convert the ASP.Net version to ASP.Net AJAX with ease.
• Installed ReSharper and am fighting with some of the key bindings, they are different than what I had at my old job.

I'm with stupid moments:

• It took me too long to figure out to do a server-side focus on a control is controlName.Focus();  I was looking for a function when there was a method call to do it right in my face.
• I blanked out once on doing CSS