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Did you know that you can add any Clearspace instance to the list of search engines available for quick searches from your Firefox or IE search box?

 

Since Clearspace is Opensearch enabled, Firefox will automatically recognize it and give you the option to add it to your drop down list of search engines.  This is made possible because we add an Opensearch descriptor to every page in Clearspace, which looks something like this:

 


<link rel="search"
    href="/opensearch.xml"
    title="Jivespace"
    type="application/opensearchdescription+xml"/>

 

This works just as well for internal instances of Clearspaces (assuming you are logged into your corporate network).

 

It is as easy as this:

  • Navigate to any page of any instance that has opensearch enabled

  • Add that search engine from Firefox's drop down

 

Opensearch is already enabled by default, so you should be able to add any Clearspace installation to your browser search box. More information about using OpenSearch in Clearspace can be found in the Clearspace System Administrator's Guide.

 

 

 



Jun 27, 2008 11:25 AM bobjewell bobjewell  

I adore this feature.

Jun 30, 2008 7:26 AM Dawn Foster Dawn Foster  

Bob,

 

I love this feature, too. We had an interesting discussion about it in our internal Clearspace instance, and we realized that we had a few developers who were using some pretty complex methods to add Clearspace searches to the search box. If we were making it harder than it needed to be, I can only assume that at least a few other people were also over-engineering the solution

Jun 30, 2008 7:30 PM gialyons gialyons  

Ok, wow. does it work the same way in IE? I'm a Mac user, so I can't test it.

Jun 30, 2008 8:32 PM Aaron Johnson Aaron Johnson  

yeah, it works the same way in IE7 (does it even need mentioning that IE6 doesn't have this?)

Jun 30, 2008 8:38 PM gialyons gialyons  

Thanks, Aaron. So, another question:

 

If the CS instance you are searching using this plugin happens to be configured with, say, Wikipedia or Google Search Appliance, will results from those engines also show up when I search CS using the browser box? It seems they should.

Jul 1, 2008 10:37 PM Aaron Johnson Aaron Johnson  

no, when you configure Clearspace to also show results next to our Clearspace results, we execute that search against their OpenSearch xml: in order for us to return results from, say, wikipedia, we'd have to go out and spider and then index all of the wikipedia articles so that when we did a search of clearspace content, we'd have a relevant score of Clearspace documents vs. Wikipedia documents.

 

FWIW, the spidering thing isn't out of the question: that's one of the things we've bantered about internally that would make an interesting integration point: you point us at your intranet or an external documentation site or something and then we'll go out and spider that content and include it in a space / community / group. Talk to Greg about the grand CTO project sometime.

 

Cheers,

 

AJ

Nov 17, 2008 12:47 PM Mike Jacobsen Mike Jacobsen  

Would be very cool to get this to do the "suggest" feature like the Google search widget does using application/x-suggestions to return suggestions in the drop down like the "native" search does within Clearspace.