IGignoramous·May 7, 2025
> Just learning about OpenSearch. Looks like ...
OpenSearch was once a personal search results aggregator conceived at A9 (Amazon's Silicon Valley subsidiary): https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch
In OpenSearch 3.0 Releaseddewitt
opensearch
Python2021–2025
dewitt / opensearch
opensearch
OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results.
5Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-04-12 17:57:07 UTC to 2025-05-07 21:05:38 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesOpenSearch is a protocol for sharing search engine query-tenplates. You can just list it in your page's link tags, & the browser ought then be able to afford the user the option to add that's search engine.
https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch/blob/master/opensearch-...
It is alas a bit complicated I'm that this particular spec allows for multiple query-parameters. Where-as most browsers seem to have a single substitution, %s.
In About the browser choice screen in the EUOr just right-click the input field, and if the browser recognizes it as a search field (they're good at it by default, but you can implement https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch to make extra sure), you'll get an option to create a search from it, with a keyword of your choosing (haven't tried Safari).
In Firefox address barI still quite like the idea of having a number of independent search engines each indexing their own specialist subjects, and one or more federated search front-ends which can pull these together.
Doing it with APIs is a little tricky to make work in a usable way though. There have been various attempts at standardised APIs, e.g. OpenSearch[0], and metasearch engines like searX[1] have what are essentially pluggable scrapers, but there are still fundamental issues like getting different results at different times and having different ranking mechanisms.
Integrating at the index level could make a more usable search, but there are lots of other issues with this approach, e.g. those experienced with Apache Solr's Cross Data Centre Replication[2]. And yes, the volumes of data may also be an issue, given a search index will typically be sligh
Read the rest
tly larger than the compressed data size, e.g. the 16M wikipedia docs are approx 32Gb compressed and approx 40.75Gb in a search index.
[0] https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch , unrelated to Amazon's Elasticsearch fork
[1] https://github.com/searx/searx
[2] https://solr.apache.org/guide/8_11/cross-data-center-replica...
Amazon was using the term "OpenSearch" themselves (via former subsidiary A9) back in 2012.
https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch/
In OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and KibanaOpenSearch was once was an initiative founded at A9, Amazon subsidiary, to create a personalized, cross-service, search engine: https://archive.is/PCKWq
OpenSearch is from an era when Amazon and Google were covertly competitive. Google didn't get anywhere with Froogle and AppEngine; whilst Alexa and A9 didn't move any mountains.
Code: https://github.com/dewitt/opensearch
In OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana