I know I’ve written about a couple of the OpenSearch plugins that I’ve done but there are a few more I published and never really mentioned. I had a UPS tracking number for a package and I saw that Google could look them up easily (just put in the tracking number as your search) but going straight to the UPS site was actually slower. So I wrote a search plugin using the same URL structure that Google does.
Then there was the time a friend asked for a search plugin that would just look for Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr. I whipped up something quick.
I’ve also put together a couple bits of search plugin for American politics. There’s one for finding out what donations a politician received from whom using OpenSecrets.org (find that search plugin here). If you want to look up a bill by number you can access the Library of Congress THOMAS search using this search plugin.
I’m sure there are others out there like these but it was pretty easy for me to make my own and pretty simple to share them. I made a page to list all the search plugins I’ve done so far and as I create new ones I’ll file them in there as well, you can see the list of my OpenSearch plugins here. Except for my World of Warcraft Armory search plugin, that one’s a little more complicated and you can find info on it in the last post I wrote about it.
Of course these aren’t official or endorsed by the sites they search but I find them useful and believe they encourage people to use the services from those sites, which is a good thing in my opinion.
