如何启用“更多”搜索结果？

Question

I'm a C# developer for Windows and I know NOT THAT MUCH about web programming. I have developed a special search engine in Java. I want to create a php interface for it. For now, I managed to connect php and Java via a Web Service. I watched some tutorials for creating a search engine and I have some slight idea of what should I do but I don't know exactly what to do with some problems. Here's the scenario I want to implement:

An Index page with a search box, user types the search query in that page, some results shows, if the user scrolls down, more results shows (like Facebook). When user clicks on a result item's link, the browser then opens another page that shows the result (also in my app).

Now what I know is that the index page should be a HTML file with a Get method to a PHP file. What I don't know is How to enable "more" results? For this, my php should send an array containing the URL of the previous results to my Java service, get the results, add them to the array and wait. The next time it should use this array.

Please let me know what code structure should I use for my app.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: Requested code samples in java server:

public String processQuery(String query, List<String> previousURLs);

this will be called for the first time like this:

processQuery("test", null);

suppose it has returned 2 results with urls:

http://www.bing.com
http://stackoverflow.com

these will be stored in an array and the second time:

processQuery("test", previous);

this will return new results which will be added at the end of the page.

Answer 1

You need to use AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) requests. Essentially as a user scrolls down the page this triggers a request to get more results. You'd probably do something like cache the last result id to know from where to get the next batch of results. You'll need to brush up your javascript and possibly jQuery in order to figure out how to implement all this - ie trigger the request, handle the response and append new elements to the DOM.

An example website that does this is Duck Duck Go . Their search results page dynamically appends new results as you scroll. Make sure you have Firefox + Firebug to inspect the page, the network requests that get made and to step through (debug) the running javascript.

Answer 2

I did it with the help of this tutorial:

http://www.9lessons.info/2009/07/load-data-while-scroll-with-jquery-php.html