Question

Since Google image search API is deprecated, one should use Google custom search API for this.

I’ve made a small example using it. My problem is I want to return google image search results only. Whereby this shows web results, and the user may switch to the image result. How can I show only the image results by default?

<div id="cse" style="width: 100%;">Loading</div>
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  google.load('search', '1', {language : 'hu'});
  google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
    var customSearchOptions = {
        enableImageSearch: true,
        imageSearchOptions: {
              layout: google.search.ImageSearch.LAYOUT_CLASSIC
        }
    };

    var options = new google.search.DrawOptions();
    options.setAutoComplete(true);

    var customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl('XXX', customSearchOptions);

    customSearchControl.setResultSetSize(google.search.Search.LARGE_RESULTSET);
    customSearchControl.setAutoCompletionId('XXX');

    customSearchControl.draw('cse', options);
  }, true);
</script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.google.com/cse/style/look/default.css" type="text/css" />

The API documentation is quite poor, it only describes how to add additional results.

Answer 1

Google images search is now supported in the Custom Search Engine API. See the API parameters section of this page. I’m using the API with python and for my application I just specify the parameter in the API call.

searchType = "image"

See this post on the cse blog.

EDIT: As Marc points out in his comment below, you need to click “Enable image search” in your CSE console.