How Does Amazon Tell A Browser to Create a Search Engine?

[mpea...@chromium.org]

Hi folks,

I'm a chromium developer.  I recently noticed that Chromium / Google Chrome's support for opensearch is broken--new search engines aren't being auto-generated / discovered when they should be.  For example, visiting amazon.com and searching on it does not create a new amazon.com keyword search engine.  It used to.

I'd like to fix this.  I'm capable at writing code in Chromium but have basically no experience in web site development.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out which method in the opensearch spec Amazon uses to notify the browser to create a custom search engine.  I searched the source code using developer tools (a.k.a. web inspector) looking for "opensearch" or "link rel='search'" to no avail.

Can one of old hands on this mailing list help me understand how Amazon is notifying other browsers of the existence of a opensearch search engine so I can then go about fixing Chrome's support for it?

thanks,

mark

P.S. In case anyone cares, for reference the Chromium bug is https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=642848

[DeWitt Clinton]

Hi Mark,

Interesting! I don't know if they used to, and recently stopped, or if the search engine was never dynamically added, but just looked like it was, because Amazon was hard-coded by the browsers.

Let us know what you find!

-DeWitt

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[Mark Pearson]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 8:29 PM, DeWitt Clinton <dcli...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Mark,

Interesting! I don't know if they used to, and recently stopped, or if the search engine was never dynamically added, but just looked like it was, because Amazon was hard-coded by the browsers.

I think it must be dynamically added.  If I start with a fresh install of Safari, I don't see amazon listed as a search engine in preferences.  If I visit amazon.com, I also don't see amazon listed as a search engine in preferences.  But if I visit amazon.com and do a search, then look in preferences, I see amazon listed.  Either there's a really intelligent strategy to decide when to display hard-coded engines (I doubt it!) or this is being dynamically added.

--mark

[mpea...@chromium.org]

In case it's not obvious from my prior reply, I still would appreciate help from someone with experience in these things.  Chromium/Chrome's opensearch support will benefit!

thanks,

mark