LINQ to Google Search Results

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Google Search via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Google Search. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Google Search Data Source".

4. Enter your data source connection information.

   To search with a Google custom search engine, you need to set the CustomSearchId and ApiKey connection properties.

   To obtain the CustomSearchId property, sign into Google Custom Search Engine and create a new search engine.

   To obtain the ApiKey property, you must enable the Custom Search API in the Google API Console.

   Below is a typical connection string:

   CustomSearchId=def456;ApiKey=abc123;

👁 Required connection properties for the data source. (QuickBooks is shown.)

5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting GoogleSearchEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select commands. For example:

GoogleSearchEntities context = new GoogleSearchEntities();

var videosearchQuery = from videosearch in context.VideoSearch
 select videosearch;

foreach (var result in videosearchQuery) {
 Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Title);
}

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.