A challenge: build a Firefox search box for your online book finding system

Two years ago Matt Hampel built a Firefox search box plugin for the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. I use it all the time, and since then I've also added a similar search interface the Michigan-wide MeLCAT catalog.

My expectation is that it could be very easy to build one of these things for every single book finding system out there, even if it's not currently easy. The search box interface in Firefox is simple enough (a very short standardized script to install), and therefore a generator that builds these scripts based on some prior knowledge and a few simple parameters should be easy to do.

In the spirit of Jon Udell's Library Lookup project, I'd like to build a system for building these things for yourself.

Some research brings up this:

Lifehacker: Make your own Firefox site search plug-in:

This easy tip just streamlines this process: all you need to do is navigate to the Firefox plugins directory, save a simple text file, and then restart Firefox. Your plugin will show up in your Firefox drop-down engines - and you can do it for any site you search on a regular basis.

That documents a process for Firefox 1.1. The 2.0 process changed, so it's harder. But the comments unearthed this plugin:

Firefox Add-ons: Add to search bar

Make any pages' search functionality available in the Search Bar (or "search box")...

Just make a right click in a search field and choose "Add to Search Bar..."

NOW: Screencast available! If you don't know what to do after installing the extension, have a look at here: http://maltekraus.de/Firefox/search-tools/addtosearchbar-screencast.html

So I installed this and started trying it out. Results:

Remember the Milk: fails to search the right thing.
Google Custom Search Engine (for the Vacuum blog): awesome
Arborwiki: awesome

encouraged by that, I continued on to do the one that prompted me for this: Cindi Trainor, who asked me what I could do for her Voyager catalog at Eastern Kentucky University. The naive "keyword" search failed me (I'm not used to typing in booleans), but the "keyword relevance" search worked just fine. Some screen shots:

After installing the search engine, here's my new search bar:

and after searching, here's the result I get:

looks like a winner!

The search bar plugin is not hard to install - just add it in and restart Firefox. I suspect that once you generate one of these that you could redistribute it to people who didn't have this extension set up, but that detail can stay til the next go -around.

Technorati Tags: eastern-kentucky-university, firefox, firefox-search-bar, plugin, search

Comments

[Andrew Turner]

It's called "OpenSearch" and is a format more general than Firefox and incredibly powerful. I highly recommend every install/implement it in their favorite cms/blog/website/engine of choice.

[Ed Vielmetti]

I wrote about OpenSearch in libraries about a year and a half ago:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2006/02/panlibus_patter.html

Haven't done the survey to see which library book finding systems support it, but you're right Andrew, that would be better than this layer of ad hockery.

[Mike]

I created one for our library that also gives suggestions just like the default google plugin in firefox. I wrote about it here:

http://ex-libris.ca/?p=291