You may notice that a while back, I did a post on adding Gizbuzz to your Firefox/IE7 search box. You might have wondered how I actually got that to work.
Well, I’m actually going to write a quick tutorial on how you make OpenSearch plugins (which is what that Gizbuzz one was). Normally, my tutorials are the realm of Gizbuzz’s sister site FOSSwire, but since this one has quite a lot of relevance to the web in general (not just free/open source software), I thought I’d put it on Gizbuzz.
OpenSearch is a standard being pushed by Amazon’s research arm, A9.com. To create a search plugin, you simply need to write a really short XML file containing instructions to the web browser on how to perform the search. The search plugins currently are supported in both Firefox 2.0.x and Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s implementation is sadly incomplete, so to retain full cross-browser support you can’t use all features of OpenSearch.
