GData is using a few elements from OpenSearch, but those would be hard to get wrong: start index, results per page, total number of results. I'd be happier if Google had joined the Atom WG instead and worked on the Feed Paging and Archiving standard (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005), but that is water under the bridge.
GData is really pretty useful. OpenSearch was just sloppy. Some element names were capitalized, some weren't. A bunch of stuff specific to A9's UI was mixed in. They insisted on using RSS in addition to Atom for a new application. They supported many encoding types, something that belongs in the presentation layer, not the protocol. [Ever tested a product that supported 150 encodings? I have.] Then they left out any way to specify the natural language used to process the query. They used two different formats for the parameters to a POST and a GET even though HTML has used a single format forever (the <FORM> element). Then they left out support for existing things, like putting a boolean attribute on the totalResults element to say whether the count is exact. There were lots of other problems that I've forgotten by now. It was pretty clear that there was no serious outside contribution or review. It was an A9 product spec that they published. Great name, but not a very good design. Overall, it was substantially inferior to the STARTS work done at Stanford in 1996: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~gravano/starts_home.html Atom and Atompub are both excellent work. The exact opposite of OpenSearch. Highly reviewed by committed people, working in multiple implementations, useful, and published as real standards (RFCs). For a broad search protocol, I'd start with GData on Atom or Atom+RFC5005. Disclaimer: I was on the Atom working group. wunder On 11/26/07 1:54 PM, "Otis Gospodnetic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ed, > Wunder minght be right. As far as I know, only A9 was pushing OpenSearch. > Now that A9 is not *really* around much, I think nobody is pushing it. I > don't know of anyone pushing GData either, other than Google, but Google is > doing rather (too?) well these days. > > Otis > -- > Sematext -- http://sematext.com/ -- Lucene - Solr - Nutch > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Ed Summers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org > Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 9:15:54 AM > Subject: Re: Opensearch XSLT > > On Oct 12, 2007 10:13 AM, Walter Underwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: >> OpenSearch was a pretty poor design and is dead now, so I wouldn't >> expect any new implementations. Google's GData (based on Atom) >> reuses the few useful OpenSearch elements needed for things >> like number of hits. Solr's Atom support really should include >> those. > > Ok this was a while ago, and my question is way off topic (so feel to > ignore). Why is OpenSearch a poor design, and how is it dead if > something like GData has used portions of it. It used portions of > AtomPub too, do you think AtomPub is dead? > > //Ed
