Minor UI Changes being rolled out

[mhl]

All,

We are in the process of rolling out a relatively minor ui change to
the search control's "search form".

We are dropping the graphic button in favor of a standard submit button
with the word "Search" on the button. Those of you using the system in
non-english locales, please bear with us for a few days while we await
translations. The button will read "Search" in english for just a few
days.

In addition to the button change, underneath the button and input area
there is a "powered by Google" branding string. This area of the form
is likely to change a little bit more over the next two or three weeks.
Several of you have asked us to provide some form of branding on the
search control and these changes represent that first step.

Please let us know if you run into problems with this set of changes so
that we can quickly and efficiently address those problems.

-markl

[Kingsley Joseph]

Mark, could you provide a plain HTML sample of the new UI changes for
those of us who've customized it a lot?

[mhl]

Kingsley Joseph wrote:
> Mark, could you provide a plain HTML sample of the new UI changes for
> those of us who've customized it a lot?

You can always go to http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ to view
live changes. That page runs a totally stock search control.

You have made a number of customizations, and by monday, I should have
something thats a bit less work on you part... In the current code we
give you two options for the "search form". We let you supply your own
input element and if provided, we will drive the control off of that.
Thats an ok solution for some use cases, but because its timer based
ends up being a bit confusing to some. The other option is that we
create the search form at .draw() time and use that. Most people use
this mode and then if they want the search form somewhere else hide
ours and build their own. I think this is what you are doing on your
site.

Moving forward, we are going to let you supply a "root" for the search
form part of the search control. If you supply us with a container
element, we will create a normal, branded form with the input element,
the localized search button, the clear button, and the branding beneath
the form. Instead of binding this into the first part of the search
control, we will attach it as a child of the element you provide. Your
site (http://success.salesforce.com/) is exactly the design point for
this new feature. Instead you you having to manually construct the
search form in the sidebar, you just place a container e.g., <div
id="mySearchForm">Loading</div> and tell us to use this container. We
will then create the form and place it within this div. You will be
able to customize it through standard CSS styling just as you could in
the past.

[Kingsley Joseph]

Great to hear that it's less work. I am, however, concerned about
ECMAScript-impaired users. Should I be concerned or not?

Also, I'm facing a less important problem with logging searches. It
would be great to see what our users are searching for. While I was
able to see this with the non-AJAX search (because the referrer logging
software analyzed it), there seems to be no way to do it now. Could you
perhaps pipe all result clicks through a proxy on the Google server, so
that we can still track search terms through referrer stats?

[mhl]

I think your problem in the past with impaired users had to do with
using styled div for the search button? The new search form uses a real
submit button. You should definitely consider switching to this.

Please review the sample:
http://www.google.com/uds/samples/apidocs/searchformroot.html

For the logging issue, if you want to remember what people on your site
are searching for, we supply you with a callout on the search control.
See:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/reference.html#_class_GSearchControl

And look at .setSearchStartingCallback().

For real referer based logging, let me look into this and see if I can
support this in some reasonably efficient and accurate way.