Increase site efficiency by retrieving just your preferred number of results

When using any of the searchers available in the Search API, four results are returned by default. Historically, it has been possible to request a large set of eight results (or ten for filter Custom Search Engines), but that’s it. We understand that there are many use cases for this API, and some of them require a finer grain of control over the number of results displayed.

For instance, with the JavaScript API, you can use .setResultSetSize(1) or .setResultSetSize(6) in addition to using the enum to request a SMALL_RESULTSET or LARGE_RESULTSET. When using the RESTful interface, you can also use any integer from 1 to 8 with the rsz parameter.

With this addition, you can now request an arbitrary number of results, based on the exact number you need. By requesting only the results you’re going to show to the end-user, you can make your site or app more efficient. Also, this will control the cursor values that can be used to retrieve subsequent pages of results (and impact paging in the Custom Search element).

For more details, check out the documentation, and if you have any questions, stop by our IRC channel and support forum.

Diacritization added to the Google Language API

Earlier this year, we launched the Tashkeel (Diacritization) service on Google Labs. I'm pleased to announce that we've added an experimental Diacritization component to the Google Language API. This is a simple JSON API which you can use to add diacritic symbols to strings of Arabic text.

To test it out, try clicking this link:
https://www.googleapis.com/language/diacritize/v1?lang=ar&message=مرحبا%20العالم&last_letter=false&callback=result

A URL-encoded string is supplied as the message parameter, and it's returned by the API with diacritics included. These symbols are useful to people just learning the language and as an important pre-step for several text processing applications.

Right now, the API only supports Arabic, but we're working on adding more languages, as well as a JavaScript API, so be sure to watch this blog for details. For more information, see the documentation and our post on the Google Arabia blog (you may want to click "view post in English").

Posted by: Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Jeff Scudder, Software Engineer