Clarience Blog

We’re excited to announce that we’ve released version 1.0 of our OpenSearch Client Library for .NET.

Feature highlights:

• Build OpenSearch compliant search requests using a simple, intuitive API.
• Consume and process OpenSearch compliant responses (RSS and Atom format supported).
• Compatible with the OpenSearch 1.1 (draft) standard.
• Display search results from compatible search engines.
• Simple to add paging support.
• Supports additional features such as query suggestions.

Please visit www.clarience.com to find out more.

OpenSearch is a standard that defines formats for search requests and search results returned as HTML, RSS or Atom documents. It provides a standard URL format for querying compliant sources and supplying search query parameters such as:

• Search terms;
• Start index and count;
• Language.

Here’s a simple example of a request URL (supplying only search terms): http://www.bing.com/search?q=opensearch&format=RSS.

Additional search response information is returned to compatible search clients, such as:

• Results in a standard format (RSS or Atom);
• The total number of results available for the search criteria;
• Suggested alternative queries (e.g. corrections or related queries).

As OpenSearch defines a standard format for search results, search clients are free to build their own UIs and render those results any way they see fit. A search client can also aggregate results from multiple search sources.

The search functionality on www.clarience.com is built on OpenSearch. This gives us some advantages over using a solution like Google Custom Search, the main one being that we can fully control how the results are rendered to the end user and provide a more seamless user experience.

Lately, we’ve been working on a project (more about that in a future post) around OpenSearch and as part of that effort we’ve been gathering up a list of RSS and Atom OpenSearch providers.

We’ll be updating the list as and when we come to know of more providers. If there are more out there that should be on the list, we’d be grateful if you could let us know via comments.