indiWiz.com » opensearch http://indiwiz.com Subhash's Tech Log Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:24:54 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 OpenSearch search providers and browsers http://indiwiz.com/2009/11/25/opensearch-search-providers-and-browsers/ http://indiwiz.com/2009/11/25/opensearch-search-providers-and-browsers/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:06:10 +0000 Subhash Chandran http://indiwiz.com/?p=587 All the major browser vendors support the OpenSearch format (yes, this means including Microsoft IE8) for registering a search provider in your browser.

Writing a OpenSearch provider

Recently I wrote a search provider for my favorite book-buying site, Pustak.co.in:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
	<ShortName>Pustak.co.in</ShortName>
	<Description>Pustak.co.in provider</Description>
	<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
	<Url type="text/html"
		template="http://pustak.co.in/pustak/books/search?q={searchTerms}&amp;type=book&amp;page=1"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Hosting your search provider

To let people use your search provider, you need to host it in the web. For our example, let us assume that you host it here: http://yourhost/your_opensearch.xml.

The MIME type of this document can be left to its default application/xml, or can be made OpenSearch specific: application/opensearchdescription+xml.

Using JavaScript to register a provider

After deploying the OpenSearch XML in your host, we need to write a JavaScript function to register the provider with your browser:

<script type="text/javascript">
function registerYourSearchProvider(){
  window.external.AddSearchProvider("http://yourhost/your_opensearch.xml");
}
</script>

This JavaScript worked with Firefox, IE8 and Google Chrome. Opera 10 was not able to understand it.

Auto-discovering OpenSearch providers

Recently when I saw my Google Chrome search providers, I saw this list:

Chrome Search Providers

I was surprised to see this list because there are providers that I have not added specifically. How was Google Chrome “discovering” these providers?

A look into the HTML source of one of the auto-registering search provider, I found the following info (in the <head> section):

<link rel="search"
       href="/mavensearch.xml"
       type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
       title="mavensearch.net" />

To let browsers auto-discover you as a search-provider, add the above in your sites!

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