Blogger: Welcome Widget (Re-Search)

On some internet sites, you may be greeted with a message like this:

You searched google for "Blogger Welcome Widget." On our site there are 500 articles corresponding to that query.

I wanted something like this for this site. In this article I present a simple bloger widget that presents a short greeting message containing query and number of search results. Clicking on the message triggers a blogger search in your blog for the query.

I extended this widget to include welcome messages to visitors coming from Entrecard and Twitter. Please see my Greeting Widget for Entrecard and Twitter.

It is fairly easy to extract information about referrer and queries using javascript. I found a search query parser at transarte.net and only changed it slightly so that only a message appears if the search comes from outside (ignoring, say, searches from the blogger navbar or a google widget).
 
Using google's ajax.api search queries can be executed and parsed. I used the simplest form so no new javascript libraries have to be loaded.
 
The query plus number of search results are a hyperlink so that clicking on the message triggers a google search in your blog for the query.
 
If you want the fast installation, just press the widget install button to get it. Make sure you edit the information about your website (address and name of your website). Put the widget where you want it.
 

<div id="search_again"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> function getRefQuery () { var Refer = document.referrer if ( ! Refer ) return false if (document.referrer.length > 0 && document.referrer.indexOf("myoutsourcedbrain") > -1) return false q = Refer.match(/(q(([^=]*)|kw)?|p)=([^"&;]+)/) if ( ! q ) return false //----- no cross-script hacking, please var qry = unescape( q[ ( q.length - 1 ) ] ) qry = qry.replace("/</g,>/g", '&gt;') qry = qry.replace("/\+/g", ' ') if ( ! qry.match(/\w/) ) return false return qry } function yousearchedfor(result){ if(result.responseData.cursor.estimatedResultCount>1) { var search_again=document.getElementById("search_again"); search_again.innerHTML='<h2>Welcome to <i>My Outsourced Brain</i>. Please feel free to leave comments. If you like the site, please subscribe to our feed. <br/>According to google, for your query "' + query + '" there are <a href="http://www.myoutsourcedbrain.com/search?q=' + query + '">' + result.responseData.cursor.estimatedResultCount + ' results</a> on <i>My Outsourced Brain</i></h2>'; } } var query=getRefQuery(); if(query){ var script = document.createElement('script'); script.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q='+query+'+site%3Awww.myoutsourcedbrain.com&callback=yousearchedfor'; script.type = 'text/javascript'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script); } </script>

 
There is one line in the code which checks whether the referral is your own site. You will have to change that line. Just search for myoutsourcedbrain and replace with some adequate string contained in your page URL.
 
It should be fairly easy to customize the message and its look. Enjoy!