Windows Live Search Image Plugin

I was having a play with the Windows Live Search APIs for a post on Liveside and thought of making a Windows Live Search plugin for Writer, so I went ahead and made a quick prototype application (which is what I normally do), then I remembered (and got reminded twice) about a Live Search plugin from Mike Taulty from last year. So I figured there was no point doing that again. Then I saw that the APIs allowed for doing an image search, and I knew I hadn’t seen one of those, so I quickly changed focus.

And so I came up with this:

Doing a search will give you the following:

You then have the choice of linking to the original source image and whether to open in a new window. The plugin itself also comes with an options window where you can set some of the defaults:

Now, a couple of things. I’ll be honest, Live Search for images isn’t the best, I did look at including Google image search as well, but unfortunately they seem to have taken their SOAP service off for new projects, which sucks. Some searches might not return any results when you would expect them to, this isn’t my plugin, it’s Live Search. Another thing, I’m not entirely convinced with the SafeSearch settings for the Live Search APIs: I can do a search on the website with the SafeSearch turned off and find things, but using the APIs, it can return nothing. I’m going to investigate that a bit further with the relevant people. In the meantime, enjoy the plugin. Source code available. With the source code, I have included the two prototype applications I made while building the plugin.

Source Code: http://www.codeplex.com/WLImageSearch
Download: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=2c9e1d9e-2cbb-4d4e-9733-e498d490b1e5

SL

Whilst writing this I was listening to John Williams – The Hunt