September 27, 2002
Seek and ye shall find… maybe.
After considering the usefulness of the bookmarklet that I posted a couple of weeks ago, my friend Grant (…no, not that Grant, the other Grant…) weighed in with some thoughts on how there should be a better, more integrated way to provide meta data on a page to indicate how to search locally, instead of having to rely on Google. Here’s what he ruminated:
The
<link rel="search"…>tag doesn’t quite cut it as that normally just links to a search form, not search results. One possibility, for those sites that have a search box on every page, would be a standard id for the form in the DOM model. Probably more robust would be a new link type. Perhaps:<link rel="searchquery" href="http://www.activist.ca/search.php?f=search&keyword=" title="Activist: Search Query">where the full query would be formed by appending the url-encoded search term to the specified href. Thinking about it further, perhaps a meta element would be more appropriate since we don’t really want users linking to the ‘searchquery’ link without the keyword added. E.g.,<meta name="searchquery" href="http://www.activist.ca/search.php?f=search&keyword=">So, your bookmarklet would search using the specified searchquery if present, resorting to Google, otherwise.
I like this idea a lot. Especially if you can use the document object model to reference a predetermined local search engine. I realize that most sites still aren’t database-driven and many simply don’t have the means to support their own search functionality. These site must rely on Google or some similar external service to provide that ability. Likewise, many e-commerce sites who have database-driven content do not offer a search facility which covers both dynamic page data as well as static informational content. My company’s web site can be included in this category. Being able to hand off the default search behavior to a more appropriate or simply more easily integrated search engine would be extremely useful, and reasonably transparent to the user. Now the question is, how can we make this concept work? Of course, your thoughts on this topic are certainly welcome. Let me know.
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