Add your search engine to Firefox with OpenSearch

Everyone wants to add its own search engine to the Firefox Taskbar like Youtube does :

I searched through different websites code sources, such as php.net, developer.mozilla.org or https://wikipedia.org and found one same line of code in the head tag : Opensearch

OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. They have a detail manual is available on their website (http://www.opensearch.org/Home)

I first thought it could be it was tough to code such a thing but not at all!

All you need is an xml file and a single HTML line of code in you head :

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/link/to/your/file.xml" title="My search!">

and the xml file is a simple description page to your search page :

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
  <ShortName>a short name</ShortName>
  <Description>My website search</Description>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
  <Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">/link/to/your/favicon.ico</Image>
 <Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://example.com/?q=" />
</OpenSearchDescription>

Of course you can modify the format of the search: Atom 1.0 or RSS2.0

More on their GitHub here : [https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch/blob/master/opensearch-1-1-draft-6.md#opensearch-description-document]

I use mine in order to search through this blog. When everything is uploaded correctly on your website, just look at the search icon of your search bar and a + should appear !

Now the only thing you have to worry about is doing the search page!

Thanks for reading!

Hope you enjoyed,

TheRolf