Add Additional Search Plugins

[Alice]

You can also add additional searchplugins for Internet Search and the Sidebar search options. (I misread the topic... didn't notice it was limited to the Netscape Toolbar... but decided to leave this post anyway)
I just posted the following at the ufaq.org forums:
http://ufaq.org/modules.php?name=Forums ... pic&t=2535
no choice in internet search from the address bar in 7.2?

....AOL/Netscape shouldn't have limited users to Netscape search in Netscape 7.2. I hope they address this issue but, in the meantime, more advanced users can try copying over the searchplugins folder contents from another version of Netscape or Mozilla.

Another option, probably easier, would be to download and install additional searchplugins from http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

All you need to do is to click on the name of a searchplugin, and you will be asked if it is OK to install:

Click OK, and that's it!

For example, in the "Browse the categories" General category I installed the following, which then appeared in the Internet Search preferences AND in the Sidebar Search dropdown list:
About (about.com)
AltaVista (AltaVista.com)
AskJeeves (ask.com)
Dogpile (dogpile.com)
Google (google.com)
Metacrawler (metacrawler.com)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

[Antony]

thanks for bring it up. So I can't search directly from the "location (address) bar"?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.9

[captjlddavis]

Antony,
Win 98se....NS 7.2

AFAIK, search from the URL bar is a bit buggy.....
1. If you have "keywords" enabled in Preferences|Navigator|Smart browsing.
2. Enter term in URL bar and hit "enter", NS will use whatever is is set for keyword URL in the all-ns.js
which is:
"http://info.netscape.com/fwd/clk70kw1/http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/"
If you want to change the keyword.URL, edit it via about:config or edit the all-ns.js file or create an a1.js file.
If you have other search engines installed. you can select one of the other engines via Preferences|Navigator|Internet Search. Enter term in URL bar and select "search" button to the right of url bar - and that is the engine that will be used.

Thats how I think it work, but I could be wrong........

Hope this helps, Like I said "it's a little Buggy"

regards:captjlddavis

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

[Alice]

First,
Thanks to the moderator who separated my post from the other thread It does make more sense as a new topic.

thanks for bring it up. So I can't search directly from the "location (address) bar"?

You CAN search from the Location Bar (aka URL bar) using the search engine selected in Navigator | Internet Search, without making any other changes, if you've enabled the SEARCH button in your Navigator preferences.

In the Navigator preference panel, look under "Select the buttons you want to see in the toolbar" and place a checkmark in front of "Search" and it will appear to the right of the location bar. Then type your search terms in the location bar and click the SEARCH button. Works for me.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

[Fulvio]

I think that I will stick to my Google button in the Prefbar.
The mycroft site is mind boggling. Too bad that they don't have Google-Maldives
And, I don't use the sidebar.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

[Alice]

For people interested in adding additional search engines in Edit>Preferences>Navigator>Internet Search:
The http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ site can be overwhelming at first, but if you look under "Browse the categories" and click the General category, you will get a long list of searchplugins that can be installed. It's not that hard to find the ones I listed, which all work for me:

About (about.com)
AltaVista (AltaVista.com)
AskJeeves (ask.com)
Dogpile (dogpile.com)
Google (google.com)
Metacrawler (metacrawler.com)
Any of the search plugins can be used as the default search engine, for searches in the Location Bar with the Search button enabled, as well as searches from the Sidebar.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

[Alice]

Just wanted to add to my earlier comment that..."You CAN search from the Location Bar (aka URL bar) using the search engine selected in Navigator | Internet Search, without making any other changes, if you've enabled the SEARCH button in your Navigator preferences. ".

You can also search from the Location bar by clicking the drop-down box that appears when you start typing in that field, as shown in this screenshot posted in the ufaq.org forum thread mentioned above:

Funny I never noticed that before, but then I don't search from the Location Bar very often.

Edit, image copied and resized by Admin

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

[Antony]

Danny_G showed us how to add Google for Internet Search in [sdp=42833]this post[/sdp].

Funny I never noticed that before, but then I don't search from the Location Bar very often.

Back to Communicator time, Netscape had a feature called "Internet Keyword".
It was continued to late 2002, they then stopped that service.
You type the search into Location bar, and Netscape will load the "most likely page" for you, if it was obvious, otherwise it would be search result page.
It worked very well.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.9

[Alice]

Danny_G showed us how to add Google for Internet Search in [sdp=42833]this post[/sdp].

Yes, that was posted at sillydog, 22 Aug, 2004 7:48 am, basically a repeat of THIS postPosted: Sun Aug 22, 2004 6:30 am (which I saw first). Danny's posts did SHOW us, in that he added an additional two screenshots to what I had posted earlier, which were helpful.

Netscape had a feature called "Internet Keyword".
It was continued to late 2002, they then stopped that service.
You type the search into Location bar, and Netscape will load the "most likely page" for you, if it was obvious, otherwise it would be search result page.
It worked very well.

I reset the default keyword:URL - it is

Code: Select all

http://info.netscape.com/fwd/clk70kw1/http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/

which redirects your text entry xxxxxxx to "http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/xxxxxxx"

So, then, there is no "Internet Keywords" Netscape database any longer? Strange that it's still set up to work, but does nothing other than a Netscape search.

I never used it, really... always used a regular Google search, from a link in my Personal Toolbar. Checking in Help, "Help and Support Center" for Internet Keywords, it says:

Important: To use Internet Keywords, you must press Enter on your keyboard (Return on Mac OS) instead of clicking the Search button. Pressing Enter activates the Internet Keyword feature; clicking Search initiates a search.

To see the difference, try this:

1. Type "apple imac" into the Location Bar and press Enter (Return). Apple Computer's iMac Web page appears.
2. Now type "apple imac" into the Location Bar and click Search. You see a list of links related to Apple Computer's iMac models.

I saw absolutely no difference between an "Internet Keywords" seach using Enter, and a Netscape search.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)

[Antony]

Netscape had a feature called "Internet Keyword".
It was continued to late 2002, they then stopped that service.
You type the search into Location bar, and Netscape will load the "most likely page" for you, if it was obvious, otherwise it would be search result page.
It worked very well.

I reset the default keyword:URL - it is

Code: Select all

http://info.netscape.com/fwd/clk70kw1/http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/

which redirects your text entry xxxxxxx to "http://keyword.netscape.com/keyword/xxxxxxx"

So, then, there is no "Internet Keywords" Netscape database any longer? Strange that it's still set up to work, but does nothing other than a Netscape search.

It was a cool feature of Communicator (4.5+), together with What's Related, but they discontinued it due to the ending of service agreement with Alexa.com (if I remember correctly).

There were some privacy concerns about those features, back then.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.9

[casey1992]

Since it didn't seem to be mentioned, I thought I'd add that it doesn't take a high level of skill to write a search plugin. Mycroft has a site with nice instructions.. Contained within are documentation, quality guidelines, a plugin generator, and a validator.

Here's what I noticed about the learning curve. I know some basic HTML and CSS. That was enough to get me going and I got two plugins working up to what I'd call beta level the same day.

I e-mailed a webmaster suggesting that he provide a search plugin for his site. He had never looked into this stuff before, but would have been someone who'd know what he was doing. By mid-morning, he had three of them written: one for his site and two for other sites.

It's been a few weeks since I played with this, so please forgive me if I'm not too clear. I didn't really work with the generator. I learned by inspecting some source codes and going back and forth to the documentation. The .src files can be opened with any text editor.

The bottom line would be that anyone with slightly more knowledge than I can write these things; that doesn't entail knowing all that much.

Here's a sample of a search plugin's code:

Code: Select all

# Yahoo Search Plug-in for Mozilla
#
# Created by Robert Fernandes (e-mail address removed by casey1992), Matthew A. McGuigan (e-mail address removed by casey1992), Rafael Ebron (e-mail address removed by casey1992)
# Last Edited May 31, 2002
# Last updated August 11, 2004

<SEARCH
    version = "7.1"
   name="Yahoo"
   description="Yahoo Search"
   searchForm="http://www.yahoo.com/r/so"
   method="GET"
   action="http://search.yahoo.com/search"
>

<input name="p" user>
<input name="ei" value="UTF-8">

<interpret
    browserResultType="category"
    resultListStart="<div class=padrc>"
    resultListEnd="SPONSOR RESULTS"
    resultItemStart="149"
#    resultItemEnd="</a>"
>

<interpret
    browserResultType="result"
    resultListStart="<div id=web>"
    resultListEnd="MORE SPONSOR RESULTS"
    resultItemStart="<li>"
#    resultItemEnd="</a>"
>

<browser
    alsomatch="http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search"
    update="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/plugins/yahoo.src"
    updateIcon="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/plugins/yahoo.gif"
    updateCheckDays="3"
>

</search>

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2