23 replies to this topic

[-Hiroshi-]

Recently stumbled across an article detailing Windows 7's OpenSearch technology, which basically adds search capabilities into explorer.

Article

Decided to cook one up for Neowin, with this little .osdx file you'll be able to search Neowin's forums from within Explorer.

Download - 1KB

Blog post with additional OpenSearch providers.

Edited by -Hiroshi-, 04 January 2009 - 18:16.

[Calum]

Again, another feature not many people know about and certain people disregard when saying Windows 7 should be a service pack to Windows Vista

Thanks for notifying everyone of this -Hiroshi- I remember this from one of Long Zheng's blog posts where he incorporated Flikr into Windows Explorer - very nice!

[-Hiroshi-]

cJr., on Jan 4 2009, 12:35, said:

Again, another feature not many people know about and certain people disregard when saying Windows 7 should be a service pack to Windows Vista

Thanks for notifying everyone of this -Hiroshi- I remember this from one of Long Zheng's blog posts where he incorporated Flikr into Windows Explorer - very nice!

No problem, I'm working on a few others from various different websites like Arstechnica and Activewin. I'll post them if anyone wants them.

[-KJ]

Is it time consuming making these scripts? Or are they flexible with different sites?

[Calum]

-Hiroshi-, on Jan 4 2009, 17:40, said:

No problem, I'm working on a few others from various different websites like Arstechnica and Activewin. I'll post them if anyone wants them.

Well I'm sure I'll find them useful (for many of the sites I visit, including Neowin) for when I finally install Windows 7. So, thank you in advance

[-Hiroshi-]

psygn, on Jan 4 2009, 12:50, said:

Is it time consuming making these scripts? Or are they flexible with different sites?

Takes me half a minute to create a new search, only restraints is that the page needs to support RSS. What it basically does is that the websites themselves don't support OpenSearch, but Windows Live Search does, and so it uses Live Search to search the pages which feature RSS.

Brandon already created one for Deviantart, you can find it in the article.

Made a Wikipedia one.. - Download

I could be wrong, or it could be a bug in firefox, but it doesn't look like Wikipedia has RSS but it still works..

Edited by -Hiroshi-, 04 January 2009 - 18:17.

[+Brandon Live]

Hehe cool, good to see some people trying out my feature

[Calum]

Brandon Live, on Jan 5 2009, 00:08, said:

Hehe cool, good to see some people trying out my feature

Oh wow, is that the feature you were appointed to develop? Or one that you helped think up? etc. (I don't know how Windows development works )

[+Brandon Live]

cJr., on Jan 4 2009, 23:01, said:

Oh wow, is that the feature you were appointed to develop? Or one that you helped think up? etc. (I don't know how Windows development works )

Using OpenSearch was my idea and I built the original prototype, but not without some crucial help from a couple other brilliant folks Because of that work I'm the dev owner of the feature for Win7. Of course it takes a lot of work from people all around the Find & Organize team to actually make it happen. Lots of pieces had to come together to pull it off.

[Calum]

Brandon Live, on Jan 5 2009, 10:07, said:

Using OpenSearch was my idea and I built the original prototype, but not without some crucial help from a couple other brilliant folks Because of that work I'm the dev owner of the feature for Win7. Of course it takes a lot of work from people all around the Find & Organize team to actually make it happen. Lots of pieces had to come together to pull it off.

Well I don't know how often this happens in Microsoft, but you must be proud that the idea you thought of (and later built a prototype of) was implemented into Windows and will become a very handy feature? (obviously when Windows 7 RTMs and is adopted by more people).

My dream job would be to work in Microsoft on one of the Windows teams, in the future, after I've learnt much more and graduated university... I can only dream though

[l Ancient l]

The idea is nice and the feature is from a "good-to-have" series...

cJr., nice dream Id also like to work but on design

[Zickar]

Is it like the Keyword feature in Firefox ?? Just a question because I still don't understand it

[-Hiroshi-]

Brandon Live, on Jan 4 2009, 19:08, said:

Hehe cool, good to see some people trying out my feature

Awesome, it's an absolutely brilliant idea, and I think it can be categorized under "Now why didn't someone think of that sooner?!"

[burnblue]

I hope you guys have tried the Flickr and DeviantArt osdx plugins that are out there.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/30/a-...rch-connectors/

Opening DeviantArt images directly inside Explorer and setting them as your background wallpaper really shows you how cool / effective this feature can be. Unfortunately I couldn't find cool uses for it beside image stuff just yet -- most plugins are just searches for web pages on websites which I am quite fine with doing on the browser. I'm not part of an enterprise with Sharepoint where I would get utility out of searching for Office docs on a company share. Obviously you can't have stuff like YouTube videos looking like regular video in Explorer (or can you? Someone please do this).

If Federated Search can do such a good job with images, can we also interact with other files in Explorer instead of just finding the containing webpage?

[+Brandon Live]

Zickar, on Jan 5 2009, 04:43, said:

Is it like the Keyword feature in Firefox ?? Just a question because I still don't understand it

Not sure what you're referring to. Most browsers use OpenSearch Description Files to add custom search providers to their search boxes. This is a bit different, as the browser just takes you to the HTML view of the results. In our case, we use OpenSearch to add the location and then RSS or Atom to enumerate the results and display them in a rich client view, the same view we use for desktop search results. There's also a lot of fancy behind the scenes work to make the items work as if they were local or on a network share (so you have drag-and-drop, open / right-click, previews, etc).

We're working on an in-depth blog post, so keep an eye on the E7 blog over the coming weeks.