I created some search plug-ins for Debian Administration once before, it has become my guinea pig site for such things. Then I used the Mozilla style plug-ins (MyCroft - and I got the XML markup wrong so they should never have worked!).

This morning I noticed that Firefox^W Iceweasel was offering me a new search engine at the bottom of the list of engines on the search box drop down, whilst visiting the Microsoft website (yes more fun with NTFS - don't use it for anything important!). Seems these are OpenSearch plugins, similar concept, but these also work in IE7 (and presumably other browsers as well).

Rather like RSS feeds, you stick a "link" in the page header pointing to the an XML file. Add a graphic to make a favicon style bookmark, hack the XML to work with your favourite search form, and you are away.

Anyway I did an example here;

http://simonwaters.technocool.net/firefox

Ignore the pages content (the old way of doing it), and check the list of search plugins available, you should have "Debian Administration" offered. Firefox discretely changes the colour of the search engine selector to tell you there is something to see.

Voodoo part;

http://simonwaters.technocool.net/firefox/searchplugins/debian-administration.xml

Easy to use, simple to create, and yet another way to encourage people back to your website. It took me 5 minutes to do this from scratch, and another 5 to figure out the image was broken because I'd mistyped the URL(doh), I dare say others could be done much quicker once you know what works. Slowest part was starting GIMP to save myself an ICO file.

This time I believe my XML is well-formed (well Iceweasel doesn't object).