I’ve been meaning to point out (and steal from) Dave Pattern’s post on tipping off IE7 (and other browsers soon too, hopefully) to available OpenSearch targets for some time now. I haven’t had time to do the stealing, so I’ll have to settle for pointing it out while it’s still news.
What’s the trick? As Dave explains, you put a link in the <head> section of your pages like this:
<link rel=“search”<br /> type=“application/opensearchdescription+xml”<br /> title=“WPopac Demo”<br /> href=“http://www.plymouth.edu/library/opac/opensearch.xml” />
When IE7 finds that, it’ll offer you a chance to add the new search target. The screenshots at Dave’s site show the whole thing.