OpenSearchFox: Firefox add-on to easily add sites to Firefox Search Box

I think most Firefox users know that you can add search plugins to the Firefox browser's search dropdown through mycroft, specifically. Unfortunately, the mycroft site is often slow and difficult to get around. And then, maybe the site you want to add a search plugin for isn't there. Frustrating.

Enter OpenSearchFox | Firefox Add-ons a fabulous new Firefox extension that will add a search plugin for ANY site that has a search box. Here's how it works.

After you install the OpenSearchFox add-on, you visit a site that has a search box. Right click in the search textarea and you'll see "Add OpenSearch plugin" in your menu.

Select that option and then you'll be presented with a very simple details popup, where you can edit the name that appears in the search dropdown and the site description and then you're done. The site is now added to Firefox's search dropdown menu. How cool is that?!

One thing to note however is that OpenSearchFox will not work on search boxes that are enhanced with some ajaxy, scripty stuff (such as the search box at the top of THIS site). All is not lost here though as I have added OpenSearch functionality to this site myself. If you check the search drop down box in Firefox 2 or IE7, you will see "Add etc. quick links" there and you can hook up search for this site easily, to use even when you're not on my site.

If you want to do this for your own site, here are a couple of resources to get your started. You'll find instructions in the article "Add OpenSearch to your site in 5 minutes" that are quick and easy to follow and will set up a site search that uses Google to provide the site-specific search results. Just a quick note for anyone who tries the instructions in this article, when I tried it out, I had an issue with the quotation marks and line breaks as copied from the code samples provided. If the new xml file you create is throwing errors, try re-typing the quotation marks in the Url line and removing the line break in that line as well. Should work fine then.

If you use blog or other site software that has it's own search functionality, you might want to check out this article at Boagworld "Add your search engine to your browser", which shows how to add OpenSearch to a Movable Type powered blog, with suggestions on how to adapt for others. One note, this apparently doesn't work with WordPress due to how it's search works.

As I use Movable Type, I opted for the second option and my OpenSearch site search plugin will return search results with MT's search tool.