This is the first of two posts covering how you can provide Federated Search to web sites that do not support the OpenSearch requirements of Search Server 2008.

Part 1. How to federate to a site that does not support a url based search?

This one is simple,  just make use of a search provider that does and use it as an intermediary to your required source.  In this example I will use Live.com to provide federated search to my web site www.21apps.com.

Step 1.  Export the Live.com FLD

MSSX comes with a FLD for Live.com out of the box,  we are going to use this as the basis for our FLD file.   From the Federated Locations page select Export from the Live.com item and save the file to your local drive.

Step 2.  Edit the FLD file to change the Internal name

Open the FLD file in notepad or other XML editor and change the Internal Name from Live to the domain you are federating to, in my case 21apps.com.  You could also make the other changes directly in the XML.

Step 3. Upload the FLD and Edit the Location setting

From the Federated Locations page choose Import Location and select the file you edited in step 2.  After uploading click Edit Locations and change the following fields

Field	Value
Display Name	<your domain> i.e. 21apps.com
Query Template	Expand the Location Information section and change the Query Template   http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}&format=rss&count={itemsPerPage}&first={startItem}&FORM=SHAREF tohttp://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.21apps.com+{searchTerms}&format=rss&count={itemsPerPage}&first={startItem}&FORM=SHAREF where www.21apps.com is your domain
“More Results” Link Template	Make a similar change to the More Results Link Templatehttp://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={searchTerms}&first= {startItem}&FORM=SHAREM to http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=site%3Awww.21apps.com+{searchTerms}&first={startItem}&FORM=SHAREM

Click OK and the new Location should be listed and available to use.

Step 4.  Test it!

Navigate to your Search Centre and search for something to take you to the Results page.

Edit the page and select your new Location.

And that’s it,  Federated Search to www.21apps.com.  

In part 2 I will look at Federated search to a well known search engine that does not return it’s results in a nice friendly XML format.