Deathlizard's Journal: Hey Google! - OpenSearch Me!

With the amount of news Slashdot has been getting regarding Google and IE7, I decided to actually sit down and play with the IE7 beta to see what the fuss was about. What I found actually surprised me. IE7 is actually Light years ahead of it's predecessors when it comes to choice.

First off, to my surprise, when I installed IE7 on my main machine for the first time, Google was my default search engine. Why? because I had the Google Toolbar installed and it adopted the setting that was set in IE6, which was Google as my default search. I'm actually amazed that MSN wasn't even on the list.

Second, IE7 is supporting an open standard when it comes to adding search providers called OpenSearch. They actually have a page Here that uses OpenSearch to add and set search providers and even set them as the default client. The selection is all over the board too, from Google (that's Right) to even Wikipedia from the search bar.

Now, for the really surprising part. I got sidetracked from an MSN search to a live.com beta search when I tried to give the MSN search a shot. What happened was interesting to say the least. The Blue search button in IE7 changed it's drop-down button color to Yellow (Apparently it turns yellow when it detects OpenSearch Data) and Windows Live Search was listed in the drop-down box as an entry with a yellow "This is New!" star next to the name. under it was another menu choice that said "Add Search Providers" and allowed me to add it to the search bar and even set it as the default if I wanted to.

I delved into the source code on Live Search, and found out how this works. IE7 supports a new mime type called application/opensearchdescription. This type refers to an XML file that enables this functionality to activate in IE7.

All Google would have to do is add this to the head of all of their search sites, make an XML file to tell IE7 what and how to add, and done. Right now, Google pops up a box in the upper right hand corner when it doesn't detect Google Search in IE7 which allows you to download a program that does this for you. In reality they didn't even have to go that far. All they had to do is support OpenSearch in their website, make a link to add the provider and it would do it all for them.

Now I'm not a Web Developer, and I'm sure that this would take a lot of time from Google, especially considering the size of Google, but It's seriously easy from the looks of it. the XML file and OpenSearch tag (Here's Live.com's search XML for an Example and in the head portion of live.com search html is the tag (link title="Windows Live Search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="search" href="http://www.live.com/search.xml") that activates the functionality) seem to be easy. I don't See why Google would be struggling with this.

Frankly, and this is my opinion, Google should Ignore Microsoft altogether and just keep doing what they've been doing for years; Make a better search and web experience. Competing with Microsoft will just kill you because you get so caught up in the competition that you forget why you exist and screw up your core with stupid business decisions. Ask Netscape, Real and recently Palm what competing with Microsoft does to a company. Simply put, it scares the company into Blinking which MS takes advantage of in the long run. Meanwhile, Apple, who generally ignores what Microsoft is doing can't keep people away from IPods even if they wanted to. Why? because when MS starts saying their competing with Apple, Apple laughs at them and releases something mind-blowing since their focusing on their customer base rather then their so called competition. Google is the Ipod in the search engine business. They should start acting like it and keep leading the future instead of crying antitrust (like they're losing the search engine battle somehow. Microsoft is #3 behind Google AND Yahoo, and MSN Search has been listed in their browsers since IE3) and competing against a practically nonexistent rival.