Tech Friday: Your Own Custom Search Providers

Not the most techie thing to do but hey, today isn’t the greatest day to be using much of my brain as most of it is concentrating on agonizing on pain. I was browsing around the blogs I monitor and found a post by Long Zheng talking about a little experiment that showed how much branding had an impact on peoples perceptions about search engines. Check out his post if you want to know more. Down the comments, I found someone saying that he wanted to make it his default browser search and saw that he created a search provider. I tried installing it but I am guessing it only works for Firefox. So I went ahead and created my own which I found was quite easy for IE8, especially with the tools that they have out there.

1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx where they already have a list of popular search providers. They also have a custom-search-provider-generatorer if you want to create one of your own 🙂

2. Go to the search page that you would like to create a provider for and search for TEST (all caps). When the results page come, paste the URL in the text box provided and name your custom search provider

3. Now you can choose to install the provider straight from the page, but if you’d like to share it on your blog/web page, what you do next is click on View XML. It should take you to a page similar to the one below:

4. Next step is to go to File->Save As and save the page to your local drive as anything-you-want.xml and upload it to your webserver, skydrive, or anywhere visible to the internet at large.

5. Now on the page where you want to share your provider, you’ll need a link that will point to the following code "javascript:window.external.AddSearchProvider(‘http://www.aimeegurl.com/blindsearch.xml’);". In my case, i have this page:

with the following code to the Add Blind Search link:

And it’s that simple 🙂

I know, I owe a super tech friday next week… especially since I skipped last week! ^_^