What is it?What is it?
KwikSearch is my first attempt at greasemonkey scripting. Greasemonkey is a powerful extension to firefox browser that lets the user customize web pages.
What does this script do? Most common search engines have introduced a number of features like image search, video search, shopping search etc. Often, it is cumbersome to keep switching between these links, especially when the links are not available in the home page (for example, Google linux search). KwikSearch lets you do this fast with special keywords. For example, you can visit Google (or one of its specific search pages like image search), type something like "image:African Elephants" to get an image-only result page.
Try it out
One way:
Install KwikSearch firefox extension and restart the browser.
Another way:
You must have Firefox 1.5 or newer.
Install Greasemonkey extension and restart firefox.
Click here to open KwikSearch script. You'll see a button on the top right corner of your page, prompting you install the script. Click on it and install. If you didn't see the button, you didn't install Greasemonkey properly.
Time to test. Go to Google or Yahoo, type "image:aishwarya rai" and press enter. Enjoy the beauty. To test again, type "froogle:cool deals" in the resulting page.
Check the detailed usage for the search engines supported and the keywords that you can use.
Detailed Usage
Read the above section first. Below are the search engines that are supported now, and the keywords specific to each of them. Note that, the keywords end with a colon (:) .
Google:
web: (Routes the search to Google web search)
image: (Routes the search to Google image search)
group: (Routes the search to Google groups search)
news: (Routes the search to Google news search)
froogle: (Routes the search to Google shopping search)
video: (Routes the search to Google video search)
scholar: (Routes the search to Google scholar search)
linux: (Routes the search to Google linux search)
Yahoo!:
web: (Routes the search to Yahoo! web search)
image: (Routes the search to Yahoo! image search)
group: (Routes the search to Yahoo! groups search)
news: (Routes the search to Yahoo! news search)
shop: (Routes the search to Yahoo! shopping search)
video: (Routes the search to Yahoo! video search)
audio: (Routes the search to Yahoo! audio search)
dir: (Routes the search to Yahoo! directory search)
If you simply type the keyword with no search string at all (say, shop:, in Yahoo!), it'll take you to the corresponding search page, and you can enter your search there. The keywords will work in most of the specific-search pages, not just the home page of the search engine.
To actually search for some text like "news:bomb threats" (that is, if you want the news: to be part of the search), just prefix the search string with a backslash (\). So your text will look like "\news:bomb threats" (without quotes). To search for something that begins with a backslash, add another backslash before the first backslash.
Bugs
Support for "local search", which is present in many search engines, is not available. Will try to add it soon. There might be a few hiccups when you use these keywords in the local-search page of the search engines, but nothing that seriously interferes with normal usage.
I have tested this only in English. Hopefully, it should work in other languages too, but let me know if there is a problem.
Credits
Thanks to:
This awesome tutorial
Greasemonkey compiler
Comments
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