Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

One of the new features for Firefox 2 is the integration of suggestions in the search box. This also means that anyone can write a server to provide suggestions like the one I just wrote for wikipedia.

Adding this to your search box is as easy as viewing this page with a Firefox alpha and opening the search drop down menu.

This highlights another feature in Firefox 2: support for OpenSearch. When Firefox detects a search engine in the page, the search magnifying glass turns red. [1] It’s also easier (i.e., possible) to remove search engines from the search drop down.

Oh, the suggest server I implemented is neither smart nor exceptionally fast. But it’s only 80 lines of python, so deal.

Update (2006-07-16): Updated wikipedia.xml to work with beta 1 syntax.

[1] This probably won’t be the actual UI notification, but it’s the behavior in the alphas.