Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7 & Firefox – The Leeds

I believe that if we could arrange to have each of Freedom’s 7000 employees use as their browsers’ default, local news resource, the web search tool, it would have an impact on Freedom revenue. At the very least, we may want to consider making this one of the steps in setting up new workstations.

By following the directions on the following page, we can use the OCRegister.com Google ‘web’ search results page our default for searches from the IE7 search bar:

Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7

There are also instructions available to add them to the Mozilla Search Bar here:

Creating_OpenSearch_plugins_for_Firefox

Technoratiâ€™s OSD fileThat page has instructions indicating how to add a search engine plugin to your browser, and ‘advertise’ how to do it to the web browser, so our visitors & staff can add them to their browsers as well. Very Nifty!

Reference Material

OpenSearch Documentation, OpenSearch Documentation about the Url and Param element
Technorati.com has a working osd.xml
More on Autodiscovery difficulties at bugzilla bug 340208
data: URI scheme
searchplugins.net – create OpenSearch plugins for use with Firefox 2. List of generated search plugins
Ready2Search – create OpenSearch plugins. Customized Search through Ready2Search

Sample OSD Code

Add this to your page’s <head /> section:


<link
  rel="search"
  type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://OSD_DOMAIN_NAME/osdwebsearch.xml"
  title="OSD_SITE_TITLE - Web Search"
/>
<link
  rel="search"
  type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"
  href="http://OSD_DOMAIN_NAME/osdsitesearch.xml"
  title="OSD_SITE_TITLE - Site Search"
/>

Add the following two files to /web/onset/sites/[yoursitecode]/web/ (NOTE: Replace JDNews.com-ish stuff with relevant text!):

osdwebsearch.xml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>OSD_TITLE - Web Search</ShortName>
  <Description>OSD_WEB_SEARCH_DESCRIPTION</Description>
  <Contact>OSD_EMAIL</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html"
       method="get"
       template="http://OSD_DOMAIN_NAME/OSD_PATH_TO_SEARCH_RESULTS/?q={searchTerms}&amp;fistype=web&amp;sourceid=opensearch">
  </Url>
  <LongName>OSD_WEB_LONG_TITLE - Web Search</LongName>

  <Image
       height="16"
       width="16"
       type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
       http://OSD_FAVICON_PATH/favicon.ico
  </Image>
  <Attribution>
       OSD_COPYRIGHT_TEXT
  </Attribution>

  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
</OpenSearchDescription>

osdsitesearch.xml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>OSD_SITE_TITLE - Site Search</ShortName>
  <Description>OSD_SITE_SEARCH_DESCRIPTION</Description>
  <Contact>OSD_EMAIL</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html"
       method="get"
       template="http://OSD_DOMAIN_NAME/OSD_PATH_TO_SEARCH_RESULTS/?q={searchTerms}&amp;fistype=web&amp;sourceid=opensearch">
  </Url>
  <LongName>OSD_SITE_LONG_TITLE - Site Search</LongName>

  <Image
       height="16"
       width="16"
       type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
       http://OSD_FAVICON_PATH/favicon.ico
  </Image>
  <Attribution>
       OSD_COPYRIGHT_TEXT
  </Attribution>

  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Functioning OSD Code (JDNews.com)

Add this to your page’s <head /> section:

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://www.jdnews.com/osdwebsearch.xml" title="JDNews.com - Web Search" /> <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="http://www.jdnews.com/osdsitesearch.xml" title="JDNews.com - Site Search" />

Add the following two files to /web/onset/sites/[yoursitecode]/web/ (NOTE: Replace JDNews.com-ish stuff with relevant text!):

osdwebsearch.xml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>JDNews.com - Web Search</ShortName>
  <Description>Search Eastern NC's premiere Information Source.
       Covering Jacksonville.</Description>
  <Contact>[email protected]</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html"
       method="get"
       template="http://www.jdnews.com/search/?q={searchTerms}&amp;fistype=web&amp;sourceid=opensearch">
  </Url>
  <LongName>JDNews.com - Jacksonville Daily News - Web Search</LongName>

  <Image
       height="16"
       width="16"
       type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
       http://www.jdnews.com/favicon.ico
  </Image>
  <Attribution>
       Copyright © 2007 Freedom ENC Communication, Inc.
       All Rights Reserved. Content may not be reproduced without
       written permission from FENC Communications.
  </Attribution>

  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
</OpenSearchDescription>

osdsitesearch.xml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>JDNews.com - Site Search</ShortName>
  <Description>Search Eastern NC's premiere Information Source.
       Covering Jacksonville.</Description>
  <Contact>[email protected]</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html"
       method="get"
       template="http://www.jdnews.com/search/?q={searchTerms}&amp;fistype=site&amp;sourceid=opensearch">
  </Url>
  <LongName>JDNews.com - Jacksonville Daily News - Site Search</LongName>

  <Image
       height="16"
       width="16"
       type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
       http://www.jdnews.com/favicon.ico
  </Image>
  <Attribution>
       Copyright © 2007 Freedom ENC Communication, Inc.
       All Rights Reserved. Content may not be reproduced without
       written permission from FENC Communications.
  </Attribution>

  <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
  <Language>en-us</Language>
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
</OpenSearchDescription>

That’s all! Wanna check it out?

Launch Mozilla Firefox (tip? MSIE7 also supports OpenSearch)
Go to JDNews.com
Click on the down arrow in the ‘Search bar’ (the box/field adjacent to the Location/Address bar, not the Freedom Google bar in the web site)

JDNews.com – Web Search

Does a ‘Web’ search using JDNews.com’s Web Search – just like searching in the JDNews.com’s Google Bar with the (o) Web radio button checked

JDNews.com – Site Search

Does a ‘Site’ search of JDNews.com articles using JDNews.com’s Web Search – just like searching in the JDNews.com’s Google Bar with the (o) Site radio button checked
You can add the JDNews.com search engine to your browser’s search bar tool by selecting ‘Add JDNews.com – Web Search’ (or ‘Site Search’)

I suspect it’d be in Freedom’s best interest to only provide [My-Domain].com – Web Search to our customers, to limit confusion. We may also want to modify the search results for searches coming from this box (e.g., to [Gasp!] remove or somehow adjust the sponsored results at the top–within contract of course!).