More Oracle for Your Browser Search Bar

I promised more Oracle search plugins, and I’m happy to deliver 3 new ones today, Oracle Blogs, Oracle Documentation and Oracle Sites. You can install them here, along with the MetaLink plugin. If you’ve recently started reading, here’s the MetaLink plugin post.

Oracle Blogs
Using this plugin, you can the search content of all the blogs hosted by Oracle, including our friends Justin Kestelyn and Steven Chan. This is especially helpful if you’re looking for an older entry or can’t recall the title. For example, if you’re curious about when Vista will be certified for the E-Business Suite, fire off a keyword search like “vista certification steven chan”, and you’ll get a results page with all Steven’s content on Vista certification.

Oracle Documentation
Using this plugin, you can search all the product documentation produced in HTML. Right now, this includes all the database documentation and middleware documentation collected here. Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect that documentation for new and future releases will also be collected into this site.

Oracle Sites
This plugin searches all the external oracle.com properties: blogs, corporate site, discussion forums, documentation, education, public partner network, technology network and video/multimedia. If you want a wide variety of information about a product, you can get collected results from all the oracle.com sites using this plugin.

The Blog and Sites plugins take advantage of the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (OSES) implementation, which indexes and crawls the oracle.com sites.

Firefox 2 users have an added bonus feature because it allows you to send a selected string on a web page directly to the active search engine (i.e. the one showing in your search box) by right-clicking.

Enjoy.

Update: Eddie makes a good point in comments. He has previously released a slew of Oracle-related plugins, and wants to know how mine are different. First off,  I am constrained by the machine, so getting plugins approved for release is a longer process, even though Oracle does not support them. Therefore, Eddie’s plugins have been in the wild for a lot longer. There is some overlap. Here are the differences:

• My Oracle Blogs plugin only searchs blogs hosted by Oracle, i.e. the ones listed on blogs.oracle.com and indexed by OSES. So, blogs not hosted by Oracle, like this one, are not included. It’s OK, we have our own plugin. Eddie’s Oracle Blogs plugin uses a Google custom search, as I described in this post. So, Eddie’s using Google to search all his OraNA aggregated blogs, including ours.
• Our Oracle Documentation plugins are almost identical, except that mine is based on the 10g database version at tahiti.oracle.com. Eddie finished his plugins so long ago that this version might not have been available then. His uses the 9i version.
• My Oracle Sites plugin is based on the content indexed by OSES. Eddie’s uses a Google custom search.

I’m realizing that our plugins have the same names, and I have changed mine to allow you to install and use both. In general, Eddie has done more work on his, by implementing a Google Custom Search. Mine are very Oracle-centric, which shouldn’t be a surprise.

Having both versions installed will give you a nice comparison between OSES and Google for a subset of data. Eddie, thanks for reminding me.