I’ve been fairly busy at Microsoft, working, and hanging out with other interns and so I’m way behind on blogging about OpenSearch.<\/p>\n
Internet Explorer 7 beta 2<\/a> and Firefox Bon Echo<\/a> are out, both with some degree of OpenSearch support. Both support autodiscovery<\/a> of Description files<\/a>. IE7 (not sure about Firefox) supports search results in OpenSearch Response<\/a> (RSS\/Atom) as well as HTML. IE7 (and I suspect Firefox) do not support extended search parameters<\/a> (those beyond Firefox support is a little odd, in that they also support some odd pseudoOpenSearch format<\/a>. So please, developers, use real OpenSearch, it’ll work equally well in all<\/em> readers, not just Firefox.<\/p>\n Firefox’s beta also has support for “search suggestions” when using Google or Yahoo. DeWitt has shown<\/a> how (see draft document<\/a>) these suggestions can be implemented in a way that is completely compatible with OpenSearch, without changing the existing format (JSON) at all. And it also opens the door to allowing suggestions themselves in OpenSearch; the Query<\/a> element is ideal for this purpose.<\/p>\n From a webmaster perspective, the OpenSearch referrer extension (draft)<\/a> is really great, allowing search sites to see where their searches are coming from. I’ve wanted this for a while, and it’s great to see it happening.<\/p>\n Perhaps more interesting than any of this is moving forward on adding structured data into OpenSearch, and DeWitt’s draft OpenSearch and Microformats<\/a> is a great step in that direction. Personally I like data to be in XML more directly (rather than embedding it within These are just some of the major happenings in OpenSearch. There are a variety of new software libraries, such as in Java and Ruby. An increasing number of organizations are basing their APIs and other things on OpenSearch. A9.com’s listing of OpenSearch providers<\/a> is now well over 300. It’s hard to believe how far OpenSearch has come and how far it looks like it may go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been fairly busy at Microsoft, working, and hanging out with other interns and so I’m way behind on blogging about OpenSearch. Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 and Firefox Bon Echo are out, both with some degree of OpenSearch support. … Continue reading searchTerms<\/code>, startPage<\/code>, etc.), but that’s to be expected at this stage.<\/p>\natom:content<\/code>, for example), but hopefully that approach can work in tandem, still using microformats. I’ll be looking into it, as I unofficially advise my university on how to create an API for their people search. Others<\/a> have been looking at this too.<\/p>\n