June 06, 2005
Firefox Advanced Search Screencast
A couple of week ago, I posted my first couple of attempts (since updated on the same URL) at building OU Firefox Search Plugins, described in their simplest form in this Firefox hack excerpt. These plugins provide additional search engines within the Firefox Search toolbar (in the post described above, plugins for the OU Search Engine, the OU Voyager Library Catalogue, and the OU IET (public) knowledge network).
Since then, I've stumbled across the Firefox Advanced Search Sidebar. To briefly summarise, the Advanced Search sidebar allows you to select one or more search engines, or create profiles containing one or more search engines, and perform a metasearch over them.
This apparently recreates some of the functionality of Mozilla search and explains the <INTERPRET> tag in the search extension definition.
What the extension does is to scrape the results from each search engine results page and redisplay them in the sidebar, as well as in an aggregated results page. You also have the option of displaying the results from each search engine directly and independently of the results from the other selected search engines.
The screenscraping is keyed by identifying the region of the search page within which the results can be found, as well as notable code fragments surrounding each search result item. The scraped results correspond to the first (?) link found in the item, and are described by the link text.
For example, this keyword search on the OU library catalogue for luddites returns a handful of search results:
The titles and links of each of these responses are scraped and republished in the sidebar.
There are a couple of problems though. Firstly, the library catalogue results are tied to a session ID, rather than a persistent URL, and as such may time out (although this could be managed by rewriting the URL in the sidebar script). Secondly, where an image tag forms part of the search result link text, as it does for instance in the results from the OU search engine, the result cannot be displayed (at the time of writing, only textual links are valid).
The search engines that you can search over are the same search engines that are 'installed' within the search toolbar. As soon as you install new search engines into the toolbar (as for example the OU search engine plugins mentioned above, or any of the other plugins described on the Mycroft search plugin page) it becomes available in the Advanced Search Sidebar.
If you still aren't sure what it is the extension does, and aren't convinced enough to try it out for yourself, I have produced a short screencast featuring an OU metasearch to show the extension in action...
Posted by ajh59 at June 6, 2005 09:44 PM