Building Search Provider and Search Suggestion Extensions
Matthew Crowley · Apress eBooks · 2010
Search providers are a great way for developers to expose functionality of their web services consistently in IE’s frame. This means that users can access a web site or search engine without having to actually visit it—a powerful concept that may very well be the future of the Web. In this chapter, I showed you how easy it can be to create search providers that give your web application this powerful functionality and allow you to extend your web application right into the IE browser frame. I began by describing the user experience flows associated with search providers, followed by a deep dive into the tags and variables associated with the two XML-based specifications used by them: then OpenSearch and XML Search Suggestions specifications. I then discussed how you can easily build a basic search provider, followed by an explanation of the installation and management process for these extensions. Next, I covered how you can extend search provider functionality using both text-based and image-based search suggestions. I concluded this chapter with some more advanced topics such as User Preference Protection. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.