OpenSearch

OpenSearch

Developed by	Amazon.com
Initial release	March 15, 2005 (2005-03-15)
Latest release	1.1[citation needed] / December 6, 2005 (2005-12-06)
Type of format	Web syndication
Extended from	RSS
Open format?	Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License
Website	OpenSearch.org

OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. 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 in March, 2005. 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.^[1]

Design

Search suggestions in the German Wikipedia

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.

• Reference to the OpenSearch Description Document must be made in the root file of the domain.^{[citation needed]}

e.g. for xyz.com the <link> reference to the OpenSearch Description should be placed in xyz.com/index.html

Thus one domain can have only one Open Search reference.

• OpenSearch Description Document must be placed on a web server of the same domain.^[2]

OpenSearch is not limited to search functionality. It can be used to pass user-submitted variables from the client browser:

• isthatSFW OpenSearch Plugin

See also

• Representational State Transfer (REST)
• Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU)
• Sherlock
• Z39.50

References

External links

• OpenSearch.org – official website, including specifications