Adding Firefox Search Engine to APEX

Today, I got tired of constantly having to login to Metalink to search for SR's that I needed to check. I do have other tools (internal) that let me do the this (oracle forms) but I do prefer to use Metalink since it is built with APEX. So here is what I did to speed up the search process; I added this to my intranet APEX application so my users can install the search engine. I also created an alternate example using Ask Tom's Site.

First I created asktom.xml with the following (note that for space purposes could not include the whole data:image string. To create your own go to The data: URI kitchen).

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<os:ShortName>Ask Tom</os:ShortName>
<os:Description>Ask Tom Search</os:Description>
<os:InputEncoding>utf-8</os:InputEncoding>
<os:Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon,%01%01%10%10%01%20h% ...
</os:Image>
<SearchForm>http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:1</SearchForm>
<os:Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:1:0::NO:RP:P1_SEARCH_CRITERIA:{searchTerms}">
</os:Url>
</SearchPlugin>

Then I added the following inside the <header> of this blog:

<link href='http://noelportugal.googlepages.com/asktom.xml' rel='search' title='Ask Tom' type='application/opensearchdescription+xml'/>

Now all you have to do (assuming you are using Firefox) is go to the Search engine and go to the bottom where it says: Add "Ask Tom", and thats it!

You can create as many Search Engines and have them available to your Firefox users.
For more info visit http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Creating_OpenSearch_plugins_for_Firefox