I’ve just enabled search autodiscovery on my site and it was remarkably easy to do. Navigating to an enabled site in IE7 results in the search box glowing orange – a check of the drop down box shows that my site’s search engine is now listed:
To enable it for your site, pay a vist to http://www.enhanceie.com/IE/SearchBuilder.asp first. This will generate the XML search description file for you.
Then, in the header of each page, add a relative link to this XML file. For example:
<link title=”alexlomas.com” rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” href=”http://www.alexlomas.com/provider.xml“>
You can find more information on IE7’s search autodiscovery at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/07/527266…
And, as it’s all an open standard, I assume it’ll work with Firefox once they release v2.
Take a look at http://www.opensearchlist.com. It lets you create your own searches but also you can browse the hundreds of searches already created for IE7.