* OpenSearch and SharePoint

OpenSearch is a specification which can be used to publish and consume search results in a standard way and thus enabling federated searches. This helps in multiple servers indexing & storing the content in their own format but still share results with others in standard way.

It helps in search client to server & search server to server collaboration.

Some of the basic features of Search Servers support OpenSearch are following :

• Accept a GET URL query from the client.
• Permit the search terms in the URL.
• Publish results in RSS or ATOM format.

OpenSearch complaint Search Servers publish their query interfaces using OpenSearch Description Document.

A very basic OpenSearch description document looks like following :

SharePoint 2007 & 2010 by default support OpenSearch. The SharePoint search service can be queried using Http Get Url and search results page has a link to get results in RSS format too.

A typical search query url looks like following on SharePoint 2007 which returns results in RSS format:

http://<your_portal>/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}