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• Browser Integration: Many recent browsers (IE7+, FF2+) can detect, or 'autodiscover', links to the document describing the search engine. Thus you can easily add your or other DSpace instances to the drop-down list of search engines in your browser. This list typically appears in the upper right corner of the browser, with a search box. In Firefox, for example, when you visit a site supporting OpenSearch, the color of the drop-down list widget changes color, and if you open it to show the list of search engines, you are offered an opportunity to add the site to the list. IE works nearly the same way but instead labels the web sites 'search providers'. When you select a DSpace instance as the search engine and enter a search, you are simply sent to the regular search results page of the instance.

• Flexible, interesting RSS Feeds. Because one of the formats that OpenSearch specifies for its results is RSS (or Atom), you can turn any search query into an RSS feed. So if there are keywords highly discriminative of content in a collection or repository, these can be turned into a URL that a feed reader can subscribe to. Taken to the extreme, one could take any search a user makes, and dynamically compose an RSS feed URL for it in the page of returned results. To see an example, if you have a DSpace with OpenSearch enabled, try:

  Code Block
  http# The Opensearch feature is available from the dspace.server.url [dspace.server.url]/opensearch/search?query=<your query> # e.g. https://demo.dspace.mysite.edu/open-search/org/server/opensearch/search?query=<your query>

  The default format returned is Atom 1.0, so you should see an Atom document containing your search results.

• You can extend the syntax with a few other parameters, as follows:

  Parameter	Values
  format	atom, rss, html
  scope	handle of a collection or community to restrict the search to
  rpp	number indicating the number of results per page (i.e. per request)
  start	number of page to start with (if paginating results)
  sort_by	number indicating sorting criteria (same as DSpace advanced search values

  Multiple parameters may be specified on the query string, using the "&" character as the delimiter, e.g.:

  Code Block
  httphttps://demo.dspace.mysite.edu/open-search/org/server/opensearch/search?query=<your query>&format=rss&scope=123456789/1

  
  

• Cheap metasearchSearch aggregators like A9 (Amazon) recognize OpenSearch-compliant providers, and so can be added to metasearch sets using their UIs. Then you site can be used to aggregate search results with others.

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