return OpenSearch results

[dps1]

Is there any way to get Zoom Search to return OpenSearch results as documented here: http://opensearch.a9.com/docs/howto.jsp? Doing this sort of thing will be really useful when IE7 becomes mainstream because it will provide a web developer using Zoom Search to integrate Zoom Search into client browser's search engine selections (as they may choose to do so) along with the big guys like MSN, Google, etc. If Zoom Search is already natively using XML for spitting out the search results, then this ought to be pretty easy using an XSL. However, from the above link, it looks like one could write a (or compile their available) Perl wrapper to implement OpenSearch with the Zoom Search HTML results.

Ideas? Comments? It would be really cool if you guys good develop a plug-in for this or to provide some good instructions for implementing OpenSearch.

[Ray]

Yes, we are planning on adding some form of support for OpenSearch output in Zoom Version 5.0. However, it has not yet been decided as to which script platform this will be made available (ie. whether it will only be available for the CGI option, or also for PHP, ASP etc.)

If you are interested in beta testing, you can contact us by e-mail in about a month's time, when a beta should be available (or at least, more news on this feature).

[dps1]

temporary and easy solution

Though not truly rss+xml, one can permit ZoomSearch integration with OpenSearch (i.e. IE7 autodiscovery) as an html provider using a search template by constructing an xml (entitled search.xml in my example, see below) as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>#YOUR ENGINE#</ShortName>
<Description>#YOUR DESCRIPTION#Description>
<Tags>#YOUR TAGS#</Tags>
<Contact>#YOUR EMAIL#</Contact>
<Url type="text/html" template="YOUR FULL URL/search.cgi?zoom_query={searchTerms}&zoom_per_page= 10&zoom_cat=-1&zoom_sort=0" />
<Developer>#YOUR NAME#</Developer>
<AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
<Image height="20" width="46">#FULL URL TO YOUR TINY THUMBNAIL#</Image>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Then, in the header of your html, you add the following:

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="#YOUR TITLE" href="search.xml" />

If you want to check this out, just visit:

http://canadianarachnology.dyndns.org/data/canada_spiders/

Hopefully, someone will soon step-up and create a full-fledged rss+xml spec'd output for ZoomSearch such that one could add the search.xml to aggregators that make use of OpenSearch.

Have fun!