Sherlock and OpenSearch Plug-ins for Firefox/Mozilla/IE7
In late 2004, I discovered that you could submit Firefox search bar plug-ins at mycroft.mozdev.org. I submitted a search bar plug-in customized to perform the same task as a search from the main Berkeley.edu page, and it was listed in early 2005. I continued to submit plug-ins, including one for the OCF.
While these search engines can be fairly useful, most people have not discovered this feature, let alone the mycroft website. So when I discovered that both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 supported an "add search engine" feature from the search bar dropdown, I decided to implement this on the OCF website by uploading locally hosted copies based on the A9 OpenSearch standard, now embraced by both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. (This is also known as "autodiscovery".) The original Apple Sherlock standard versions are still listed at mycroft.mozdev.org for those who use Firefox 1.x.
What this means for OCF website visitors
Here's a summary of my point. Now when visiting the OCF website at www.ocf.berkeley.edu, Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 users will have an option to add custom OCF and Berkeley search plugins, so that they become part of the included bundle of sites (Creative Commons, Answers.com...). I hope you find this as useful as I do. Thanks for reading!
