What are we facing?

I want to help my website users quickly get to things they want on my site from within IE8 and FF browsers, without having them to go to the search page of my site. 

The solution

We can use for that OpenSearch which “is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. It is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format.” Using OpenSearch, you can create the plugin for IE8 and FF to do it. Follow these steps:

• Create an OpenSearch description file.
• Link to that file from the head section of an HTML page.
• Make an autocomplete/suggestion script that returns a JSON-encoded array of the original search term and an array of suggested terms.

Some external references

Internet Explorer 8

Sébastien Zimmermann posted a great mini about implementing Visual Search for IE8. "Making your website available for search from within the browser enables your customers/users to access your website whenever they need a service from it, without having them type your full web address. Additionally, you (and your brand) are always there with them"

Firefox

Mozilla Develper Center also posted about it here. “Firefox 2 supports the OpenSearch description format for search plugins. Plugins that use the OpenSearch description syntax are compatible with IE 7 and Firefox. Because of this, they are the recommended format for use on the web.”