DeWitt Clinton

Microsoft is again moving the OpenSearch protocol forward. First with IE7, and now their enterprise Search Server 2008, which is using OpenSearch as the foundation for their Federated Search Connectors.
The most interesting part to me is what Microsoft is doing to extend the power of the OpenSearch description document format. They’ve [...]

Perhaps one of the most interesting, but as yet most under-noticed, bits of technology to come out of Google in the past year is Google Co-op Custom Search Engines. Google CSE’s give users the power to create a search engine specifically tailored to any topic they can imagine.
A few of us at [...]

David Kane over at Eph Blog posed a question on how to create a feed that aggregates news sources on a particular topic. As he illustrates, a single news search engine alone limited insofar as it may not cover enough news sources. The comments to his post discuss a few possible ways to [...]

The Live Search team just launched a major revision of their innovative Live Search Macros product. Zach Gutt (a super nice guy on Microsoft’s search team) writes all about the new features on the Live Search WebLog. Be sure to read his full post here.

Search Macros are a clever technique that gives the [...]

Sam Ruby has been working on adding OpenSearch validation capabilities to the invaluable Feed Validator for Atom and RSS. I can’t thank Sam enough for putting his time and energy into this. You can read all about Sam’s efforts with this project via this post on Sam’s blog.
In his post, Sam also brings [...]

I would like to invite everyone to visit the new website for the OpenSearch community:

http://www.opensearch.org/

The OpenSearch.org website houses the most recent version of the OpenSearch specification, hosts a new mailing list, and will provide a resource for everyone that would like to get involved with the design and development process. The site is powered [...]

As has been observed before, microformats work particularly well in the context of syndicated search.
With that in mind, here is something that I have been working on:

A draft document on OpenSearch and microformats.

But first, some background:
Microformats exhibit a profound and subtle characteristic in that they can be used to present structured and semi-structured [...]

I notice that the milestone release of Firefox 2 has implemented a mechanism for “Google Suggest“-style auto-completions right in the browser’s search box. Very neat feature.
I haven’t pinged Gavin yet about whether or not this feature will be exposed in the new search plugin model. This document hints that it might be; [...]

Bit by bit, progress was made on the demo/prototype for the little machine. The “little machine” is an experiment on how one could a) use Atom 1.0 files as a canonical store for content, b) offer read/write access via APP, c) build a real-time in-memory index of that content, d) surface that index via [...]