How about performing a search across your own site and a couple of other vendor sites?

Why not provide other sites a programmatic way to search your site without crawling your site with rogue bots?

OpenSearch is a standard by Amazon which allows you to share search results through RSS.

The feeds are valid RSS, they just contain extra meta-data for searching. So, you can use OpenSearch with any RSS reader to set up feeds to track tags or keywords for example.

DRUPAL has a module for providing openSearch feeds as well as consuming openSearch feeds with an aggregator module.

And the best – OpenSearch Aggregator presents its results through the normal Drupal search system.

So, if you install that module you automatically provide OpenSearch feeds for the aggregated search.

In other words, Drupal is now a complete OpenSearch processing suite! There is no other CMS out there that can claim this. funky!

Of course you might say – hey, but Google has custom search features and I could easily build a custom search engine for crawling my favorite sites or provide a search across my network of content sites…

Sure, you can hand it to Google… and make your dependency from Google worse… ever heard of Google not crawling the whole site just because your page rank is too low, you got too few links or the accuse you of spamming their index… what ever reason they might find – they could boot you from the index completely… and that would kill your funcionality…

so OpenSearch is a way to get site-specific search results from the site itself – without hassles of PageRank, inbound links, crawling depth, dupe content penalities and whatever kind of filters Google might apply to you content…

think about it :-)