Google, Bing, other search engines OpenSearch link missing?
February 5th, 2011 | by Sean |When did that happen? In a demo that reminded me of days working in large software houses, I showed my brother-in-law how he could add Google to his IE9 search engine list by just going to Google’s homepage and right-clicking the search engine drop-down list for the “Add Google Search…” option. It wasn’t there. I think my demo reminded him of all my previous demos of how easy things are on the Web.
“It should work!” I said, and triumphantly showed him how easy it is with Bing and Yahoo! Search. It failed with them too! I’m sure that all those sites once had a <link rel="search"> element compatible with the OpenSearch standard in their heads that was the cue for browser search engine handling to pick up new search engines. Now none of the big ones appear to have that link. You can still see the OpenSearch link elements in pages from blekko, DuckDuckGo, and also from spider.my.
I thought OpenSearch was a VeryGoodThing. Why have the search majors stopped using it?