Since the launch of the new Search Icon Feature yesterday, I began to notice a few lag issue with some site’s installation page. After a few hours of investigation, I found that the icon auto-discovery feature was slowing the installation in some cases (but not all)
As a response I just installed a new caching feature in the installation xml pages that greatly improves the installation speeds.
Earlier today we deployed a new feature on addoursearch.com that automatically searches for and installs your site’s favicon into FireFox search plugin menus. (see example image at the bottom of this post)
This feature will automatically search the root directory of your site for either favicon.ico or favicon.png and if found, will add that icon to your visitors browser search plugin menu.
Our installation page has already been upgraded with this feature, so existing users of our Browser Search Plugin Widgets will not need to re-create their widget.
To ensure that new and existing widget users can take advantage of this service, please adhere to the following requirements:
Search Icon Auto-Discovery Requirements:
File type: .png or .ico image formats
File Dimensions: 16×16 pixels
File Name: favicon
File Location: In the root directory of your site.
(ex: www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico)
We will be adding support for custom icon locations and names in the near future.
*NOTE: Internet Explorer DOES NOT support icons in their browser search menu. So this feature will only work in FireFox and Flock Browsers.
Troy Peterson | Uncategorized | Thursday, August 14th, 2008
I’m proud to announce that at approximately 9pm C.S.T., our delivery servers recorded the 1 Millionth badge served in a little over 2 months since our launch on June 5th.
Our “on-track” plan had us serving 1 million badges by the 2 month mark, so we’re slightly behind that goal, but we’re still happy with the results.
The List is a running blog of featured sites that you can add to your browser’s built in search function.
We started The List to show off some of the featured sites currently using our Search Plugin service and to display sites that we believe would be useful to our users.
We currently have a select list of sites to start the blog going and are planning on adding at least 2 new additional sites per day moving forward. Some submitted by our users, some we found ourselves.
As a response to the ReadWriteWeb’s article entitled “11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google“, one additional trend that could also distrupt the major search engines is something we’re calling “Distributed Local Search”.
With the adoption of the OpenSearch Format into major browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer, it provides users with a way to circumvent the major search engines all together and search directly from the source. This feature is still in it’s infancy, so it probably isn’t on the radar screens at this time. But, as more browsers begin to include the OpenSearch format in their feature list and more site owners realize the potential it brings, the trend will begin to get more recognition from the major players.
Granted we do have a vested interest in this trend and hope that Addoursearch.com can be the catalyst to bring this function into more of a main stream search and marketing channel, but we do believe that this has a great potential to cause at least a ripple in the search arena.
With FireFox’s recent announcement that they will be releasing Firefox 3 next week, we’ve bumped up our own release schedule and added support for FireFox 3 a few weeks early.
Addoursearch.com is now compatible with Firefox 3 (RC3) as of 11pm today.
We’ve tested it using Firefox’s Release Candidate 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS 10.4.
As a response to some user feedback, we made a small change to the Installation page. We’ve added a “learn more” link near the header to help explain to users a little more about what the service does.
We’re hoping this will improve the installation rate.
Troy Peterson | Development | Monday, June 9th, 2008
Just added support for Flock - The Social Web Browser.
The Flock approach to open search is a little different than Internet Explorer or Firefox, in that it doesn’t seem like you can change the default search engine on the fly.
But, it’s an interesting approach and a cool little browser none-the-less.