How open search?

1 June 2006

One of the latest “standards” for web browser to become popular recently is OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a fairly complicated way of standardising search results, so that a search engine can utilise the search functions in a website. As a website knows the makeup of its content, it is liable to produce better results then a standard search engine would.

Now, this is all well and good but is being used by the two new major browsers – Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 – in a boneheaded way. Both these new browsers are using the system to enable users to add additional search engines to their search box.

Obviously it’s good to allow people to easily add more search options other then the fairly standard google search, but why should the website have to conform to a complicated standard (which requires the creation of an xml descriptor file, and the provision of search results via rss) just to be allowed in the search box?

OmniWeb – almost certainly the best designed and featured browser on the market (ignoring the fact that it costs money) – solved this problem ages ago (I think in version 4): You can simply click inside any search field on any page, click the “Add search shortcut” button and that’s it!

Quite why Firefox – at least – hasn’t half-inched this feature is beyond me; it’s so useful, and I bet half the sites I have it set up to use (including, for example, searching my own blog admin for posts) won’t adopt this new standard.

From: Articles

1 June 2006