What is the RSS symbol in search results all about?
Clicking on the RSS symbol sends the current query back to Nutch to a servlet named OpenSearchServlet. OpenSearchServlet reruns the query and returns the results formatted instead as RSS (XML). The RSS format is based on OpenSearch RSS 1.0 from a9.com: ” OpenSearch RSS 1.0 is an extension to the RSS 2.0 standard, conforming to the guidelines for RSS extensibility as outlined by the RSS 2.0 specification” (See also opensearch). Nutch in turn makes extension to OpenSearch. The Nutch extensions are identified by the ‘nutch’ namespace prefix and add to OpenSearch navigation information, the original query, and all fields that are available at search result time including the Nutch page boost, the name of the segment the page resides in, etc. Results as RSS (XML) rather than HTML are easier for programmatic clients to parse: such clients will query against OpenSearchServlet rather than search.jsp. Results as XML can also be transformed using XSL stylesheets, the likely direction of UI devel
