In Windows7 you can create custom search connectors to OpenSearch search engines.
And YES… SharePoint 2007 en 2010 publish OpenSearch standard search engines.
It is really simple to create a connector to SharePoint.
- Open Notepad and copy in the XML below
- Replace the areas in red with your SharePoint Search Center information. Be sure to only replace just the part of the URL that gets to your Search Center: e.g. http://sharepoint.company.com/SearchCenter
- Change the scope if you want: e.g. &s=Intranet or &s=All%20Sites or even &s=People
- Save the file to your Desktop as: SearchMySharePointSite.osdx
- Double click the file to install the Search Connector. (it will install to your “Searches” directory e.g. c:\Users\<username>\Searches
And if you don´t have enough connectors… here is the rest of them
Amazon, DeviantArt, eBay, Flickr, Google Blogs, Google News, Live Search, MSN Search, Redmond Pie, Wikipedia, Yahoo and YouTube
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/” xmlns:ms-ose=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/”>
<ShortName>SharePoint Search</ShortName>
<Description>Search the SharePoint site.</Description>
<Url type=”application/rss+xml” template=”http://sharepoint.company.com/searchcenter/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}&s=All%20Sites“/>
<Url type=”text/html” template=”http://sharepoint.company.com/searchcenter/Pages/Results.aspx?k={searchTerms}&s=All%20Sites“/>
<ms-ose:ResultsProcessing format=”application/rss+xml”>
<ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>-1</ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>
</ms-ose:ResultsProcessing>
</OpenSearchDescription>