Internet Explorer 7 provides a new extensibility model for the search textbox built into the shell.  After reading the documentation I wondered what it would take to integrate it with Community Server 2.0

First you must define an XML document that provides some information on your site and the "template" that should be used when submiting a search request to your site.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>Agramont.net</ShortName>
  <Description>Search content on Agramont.net</Description>
  <Contact>agramont@hotmail.com</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html"
       template="http://agramont.net/search/SearchResults.aspx?q={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

The above file needs to sit on your site somewhere (I suppose it could be on another server, but that’s just kinda funky) as the next step will need to point to this file.
The next step is to leverage the “Auto Discovery”  feature of Open Search/IE7.  To do this, you must put a “link” tag in your HTML Header and point to your xml file as defined above.

To do this via Community Server for the entire site, follow the below steps:

1. Login to Community Server as an administrator
2. Navigate to  Control Panel > Administration
3. Within the “Settings” left navigation tab, click on “Site Content”
4. Enter the below “link” tag into the “Raw Header” text box
5. Click the Save button

<link title="Agramont.net Search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="search" href="http://agramont.net/provider.xml"></link>

At this point, you should be good to go.  Due to how Community Server caches setting information, you may need to wait 5 minutes before this goes into affect or you can “touch” the web.config file to force a reload of the CS site.

To see this at work, visit my site, http://agramont.net/ with Internet Explorer 7 (I tested this with Beta 3) and notice the icon in the textbox “light up”.

When you click on the search drop-down arrow, you should see the new search provider.

When you select the new search provider, you'll now see the "Short Name" in the textbox as a visual cue that it worked.

At this point, your search will only be available when you're currently at your site.  In order to make it available all of the time, the user will need to select your site in the "Add Search Providers" menu.

Once you do this, Internet Explorer will ask the user if they want this action to take place.

There's lots more you can do with the Open Search provider XML and you can even trigger the call to add the search provider via an html button and some Javascript, but this should get you on your way.

References:

• Search Provider Extensibility in Internet Explorer 7:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp
• OpenSearch documentation: http://opensearch.a9.com/spec/1.1/description/