Some OpenSearch sites for reference

Do you know www.opensearch.org? This is a open standard for search engines, which is created by A9.com from Amazon.

Why does it matter? Don't look at all those boring documents on opensearch.org, generally speaking, this is a standard that requires search engines return a RSS/ATOM feed. So you can use your favorite feed reader, get the best answers just in time.

Meanwhile, a standard RSS feed allows you intergrate different search engine results into your own application. For example, you have a enterprise search engine inside your company, but you want to intergrate some search results from outside, an iframe is okay but not very good.  With XML+XSLT, you can intergeate them very easily. This is not limited to search engines, you can try different ideas, Yahoo Image Search, Google News Search, Live Spaces Search, LinkedIn expert search... Anything.

Well, what if a site does not return RSS feed? Wikipedia, Linkedin, they don't have anything. Oh, Wikipedia said they support opensearch, but they only support a part of the standard. What they returned can only be used in IE7/Firefox live search.

Live.com has a very useful feature to solve this problem. It can return RSS feed for any results. To give wikipedia a RSS feed, just use

https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+site%3aen.wikipedia.org&format=rss

And that's all.

Here I list some of the sites to be used with RSS feed:

WikiPedia (en-us)	https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+site%3aen.wikipedia.org&format=rss
WikiPedia (zh)	https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+site%3azh.wikipedia.org&format=rss
Live Search	https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}&format=rss
Live News	https://search.live.com/news/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}&format=rss
Google Blog	https://www.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en-us&q={searchTerms}&lr=&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
Google Blog (zh-cn)	https://www.google.cn/blogsearch_feeds?hl=zh-cn&q={searchTerms}&lr=&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
Google News	https://news.google.com/news?hl=en-us&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q={searchTerms}&output=rss
Google News (zh-CN)	https://news.google.com/news?hl=zh-CN&ned=cn&q={searchTerms}&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
Flickr	https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags={searchTerms}&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
LinkedIn	https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}+%28site%3Awww.linkedin.com%2Fpub%29&format=rss
MSDN	https://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Feed.aspx?brand=msdn&query={searchTerms}&lang=en-us&feed=rss
MSDN China	https://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Feed.aspx?brand=msdn&query={searchTerms}&lang=zh-cn&feed=rss
TechNet	https://search.technet.microsoft.com/search/Feed.aspx?brand=technet&query={searchTerms}&lang=en-us&feed=rss
TechNet China	https://search.technet.microsoft.com/search/Feed.aspx?brand=technet&query={searchTerms}&lang=zh-cn&feed=rss
Technorati	https://feeds.technorati.com/search/{searchTerms}?language=en
Technorati (zh)	https://feeds.technorati.com/search/{searchTerms}?language=zh
Wired	https://www.wired.com/search/rss?query={searchTerms}
Yahoo	https://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query={searchTerms}&adult_ok=0
Yahoo Images	https://api.search.yahoo.com/ImageSearchService/rss/imageSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchimagerss&query={searchTerms}&adult_ok=0
Yahoo News	https://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p={searchTerms}&ei=UTF-8
Britannica	https://www.britannica.com/opensearch?query={searchTerms}&ct=eb&start=0&count=20
del.icio.us	https://del.icio.us/rss/tag/{searchTerms}?language=en
Youtube	https://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/{searchTerms}.rss
Amazon	https://amazon.com/rss/tag/{searchTerms}/new?length=100

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2008
  Is MOSS Search compliant with OpenSearch standard?

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2008
  Yes. The search result RSS feature can be seen as an OpenSearch service provider. What I know is, in enterprise search field, MOSS, MSS and IBM OmniSearch Yahoo Edition(not Enterprise) support RSS/ATOM style feed.

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2008
  Is there a list of URL parameters used in search.live.com?  I see q, count, format, first.  What about totalresults, etc?  

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2008
  Please check here: http://help.live.com/Help.aspx?market=en-US&project=WL_Searchv1&querytype=topic&query=WL_SEARCH_REF_AdvancedSearch.htm