OpenSearch explained

OpenSearch
Owner:Amazon.com
Latest Release Version:1.1 Draft 6[1]
Genre:Web syndication
Extended From:RSS
Open:Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5

OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow the publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. Introduced in 2005, it is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format.

OpenSearch was developed by Amazon.com subsidiary A9 and the first version, OpenSearch 1.0, was unveiled by Jeff Bezos at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on 15 March 2005.[2] [3] Draft versions of OpenSearch 1.1 were released during September and December 2005. The OpenSearch specification is licensed by A9 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.[4]

Support

Web browsers that support OpenSearch include Safari,[5] Microsoft Edge,[6] Firefox[7] and Google Chrome.[8]

Mozilla have indicated that they will deprecate OpenSearch search addons in favour of WebExtensions search addons. This will not affect the ability to manually add an OpenSearch engine from a website[9] As of December 5, 2019, search engine add-ons for Firefox that are powered by OpenSearch have been removed from Mozilla Add-ons.

Design

OpenSearch consists of:

  1. OpenSearch Description files: XML files that identify and describe a search engine.
  2. OpenSearch Query Syntax: describe where to retrieve the search results
  3. OpenSearch RSS (in OpenSearch 1.0) or OpenSearch Response (in OpenSearch 1.1): format for providing open search results.
  4. OpenSearch Aggregators: Sites that can display OpenSearch results.
  5. OpenSearch "Auto-discovery" to signal the presence of a search plugin link to the user and the link embedded in the header of HTML pages

OpenSearch Description Documents list search result responses for the given website/tool. Version 1.0 of the specification only allowed one response, in RSS format; however, version 1.1 provides support for multiple responses, which may be in any format. RSS and Atom are the only ones formally supported by OpenSearch aggregators, however other types, such as HTML are perfectly acceptable.

Alternatives

Mozilla Firefox offers a bookmark keyword feature[14] where an occurrence of in the bookmark URI gets replaced with the terms typed in the address bar following the initial keyword.

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 6. GitHub. 2019-12-08. 2020-05-21.
  2. Web site: Speaker Jeffrey P. Bezos. 2005. O'Reilly Media. 2020-05-21. https://web.archive.org/web/20120504050315/http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_spkr/1848. 2012-05-04.
  3. Web site: OpenSearch at A9 . 15 Mar 2005 . 9 Mar 2021 . https://archive.today/20210313203436/https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/historical/archives/000542.html . 13 Mar 2021 . allthingsdistributed.com . Werner . Vogels.
  4. Web site: LICENSE.txt. GitHub. 2018-05-31. 2020-05-21.
  5. Web site: What's New in Safari 8.0. 2018-02-22. Apple. In OS X, website developers can aid Safari in discovering searchable content by including an OpenSearch description document on their site, [...]. 2020-05-21.
  6. Web site: Change your default search engine. 2020-04-16. Microsoft. However, you can change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge to any site that uses OpenSearch technology. 2020-05-21.
  7. Web site: Supporting search suggestions in search plugins. 2019-03-23. Mozilla. Firefox supports search suggestions in OpenSearch plugins. 2020-05-21. 2021-01-24. https://web.archive.org/web/20210124073052/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Supporting_search_suggestions_in_search_plugins. dead.
  8. Web site: FAQ for web developers. By providing an OpenSearch description document (OSDD), you enable Google Chrome to include your site in the list of search engines in the browser.. https://web.archive.org/web/20120101182352/http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/webmasters-faq.html. 2012-01-01. dead. 2020-05-21.
  9. Web site: Search Engine add-ons to be removed from addons.mozilla.org. 2019-10-15. Caitlin. Neiman. Mozilla. 2020-05-21.
  10. Web site: Autodiscovery in RSS/Atom. GitHub. 2019-12-08.
  11. Web site: Autodiscovery in HTML/XHTML. GitHub. 2019-12-08.
  12. Web site: How to return OpenSearch results from your search engine. Developer how to guide.wiki. 2018-04-14. 2020-05-21.
  13. Web site: MIME type application/opensearchdescription+xml. GitHub. 2019-12-08.
  14. Web site: Bookmarks in Firefox | Firefox Help.
  15. Web site: Revision 1525363 Adding search engines from web pages MDN . wiki.developer.mozilla.org . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20200711122132/https://wiki.developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/sidebar/Adding_search_engines_from_Web_pages$revision/1525363 . 2020-07-11.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "OpenSearch".

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