Many web browsers now support searching websites directly from a box in the main window’s menu/toolbar area.  This started initially with Mozilla Firefox and has since been adopted by Internet Explorer (since version 7), Safari and Chrome to name just a few.  Over the years, this has developed into a standard known as OpenSearch.

We thought it would be a good idea if you could launch our job search directly from the web browser, and so we came up with this little plugin.

For the moment, it only supports Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox 2+; this is because although there is a standard, the different browsers appear to have a different understanding of the standard.  As a result, we suggest Internet Explorer 8 as providing the best experience.

In order to install it on Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can go to this project’s front page, or you can click here.

Once installed, you can now type a job search string directly into your browser’s search box which, in Internet Explorer or Firefox, is located on the top right of the main window, next to the address bar:

(In Firefox 3)

(In Internet Explorer 8)

When you type a search, e.g. ‘C#’ and press enter, you will be taken straight to our search result page:

Additionally, if you’re using Internet Explorer 8, you will also see the top search results listed as search suggestions:

Selecting any of those results will take you straight to the application page for that job; which also includes the full description of the job.

Now because, unlike our Windows Sidebar Gadget, you do not get to choose a country for your search; you have less control over the type of results that you’re going to be fed.  Simply typing ‘C#’ could yield one result from the United Kingdom, and another from the USA.  As a result, it pays to be a little bit more specific about the location you’re looking for in the search box – hence the search above states ‘c# OR VB London’.

Why not real search suggestions?

Search suggestions, when plugged into a general search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, provide a guide as to what you should type in order to get the results you want. Thus, they provide a useful insight into terms that you perhaps don’t already know that would aid your search if you were to include them.

When searching for jobs, our experience shows that most people already know what it is they’re looking for; so our aim is to get the results in front of you as quickly as possible.  Therefore, our usage of the OpenSearch Suggestions extension is to provide alternate URLs (in the form of Job Application Page links) for the browser along with the result text, which is taken from the headline text of the job itself.  We feel that using the suggestions extension in this way provides a better experience for you, the user.

Firefox supports search suggestions – why do they not show in Firefox?

This is indeed correct – when using the Google or Bing search provider in Firefox, you will see search suggestions as you type.  However, whilst Firefox supports the OpenSearch Suggestions extension, it does not support it fully, and it looks as if this feature is considered a ‘nice to have’ feature instead of a must-have feature.

At present, if we switch on the search suggestions for Firefox (it uses the JSON suggestions specified by the OpenSearch spec instead of the XML suggestions that Internet Explorer uses), you see the same results as in Internet Explorer, but selecting one of them takes you to the Search Results page, with the title of the job as the search query – this is not ideal behaviour as a search for the exact title of a job doesn’t just return that one job.  The specification says that if an alternative Url is supplied in the suggestions, then the browser should use that – but Firefox does not.

We are considering contributing to the Firefox project in order to fix this bug, but in the meantime we’re focusing on developing more features for you guys!

What about Safari, Chrome and the rest?

Google Chrome’s Omnibox, whilst very clever indeed, cannot be configured to use a search provider in the same way that Internet Explorer and Firefox can.  Chrome auto-detects websites which present their content search in an OpenSearch-compliant way (that is, queries being passed through query strings).  Our site search can be launched in this way (that is indeed how this plugin does it), but the search box on our website doesn’t do this.  In order to add our search provider to Google Chrome, you have to do it manually:

1. From the Google Chrome main window, click on the Spanner on the right hand side of the Omnibox, and select “Options”.
2. On the ‘Basic’ tab, click on the button named ‘Manage’ in the section ‘Default Search’.
3. Click on ‘Add’, and then fill out the three textboxes.  The keyword and URL are the most important part:

The base URL to use is www.jobserve.com/searchresults.aspx?q=%s.  If you are using this URL to manually configure search providers on other browsers, it’ll be the same – but take note that the ‘%s’ placeholder might be different.

Apple’s Safari does not support customisation of it’s search providers.  There is a plugin available called 'Glims' (for the Mac version of Safari only) which provides the ability to customise the search providers.  Once installed, you can use the steps similar to those mentioned above to configure.

These are the major browsers which have been tested thus far – but we will not leave it there of course; we will keep you all updated as and when we are able to confirm the support for this system in other browsers.