One of the most important elements of Swirl Metasearch is the SearchProvider. In this video, Erik Spears and Sid Probstein from Swirl take a good look at SearchProviders.
Some of the details covered in the video include:
Query and result mapping configuration
How you can use JSONPath to normalize responses from enterprise sources to the Swirl schema
Configuring source capabilities like NOT
SearchProviders also contain:
Configuration information such as the URL of the endpoint
The protocol or connector to use with this source
Parameter mappings for query features like date sorting
Tags and other information that make the provider more useful
Although SearchProviders are stored in the Swirl configuration database, they can be viewed and edited as JSON records.
Here’s an example of one for a Google Programmable Search Engine:
The API endpoint for managing SearchProviders is /swirl/searchproviders. New ones can be created with PUT.