While most people search the web in general, there are times when one needs to dig deeper in one particular area. It can be news, photos, videos or looking up the definition of a word.
This is not news at all and all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Live/MSN and Ask, provide links to search a particular type of content. But since these are commercial companies, with competition to fight, they only link to their own search services even when other engines provide a better service in some of those areas.
This is an opportunity for an independent search tool that focuses on providing one interface to the best search services in a particular area by default and letting power users customise it with their favourite engines and adding other content types.
That's where SearchWith comes in. SearchWith extension for Firefox, Thunderbird and Flock is a search extension that I wrote that enables users to search different types of content on the web (and your computer for Google Desktop users).
SearchWith allows users to categorise engines per content type (e.g. YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Video under Videos), add/remove engines and content types (called Services in SearchWith) and choose which engine is used by default -- all this without bloating the context (right-click) menu.
The latest version also allows searching multiple sites simultaneously when you use the Advanced Search dialog accessed by SHIFT+clicking on an option under SearchWith menu or right-clicking without selecting text.
Check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2194 or, if you're in Firefox, you can just Install SearchWith
5 comments:
Very nice!
:D
thegreenvoid.blogspot.com
Looks quite impressive. Can't wait to check it out on Friefox restart ;>
Hello,
Thanks for the effort, this is really a great plugin. I have some questions and suggestions.
1) When add a new service say "books", it seems can not show up in the context menu?
2) Also I'm amazed about the function of search multiple sites simultaneously, but it now needs to bring up advanced search dialog first then search. Is it possible to configure "search multiple sites" as default, or just bundle the advanced search dialog to a toolbar/button or something to avoid extra clicking.
Thanks again for the great effort, really appreciate it.
@move
1. When you add a new service (e.g. Books), you need to select at least one search engine for it (e.g. Amazon) to enable it on the context menu otherwise SearchWith will not know what engine to use.
2. When you Select All engines in the Advanced Search dialog box, the next time you use that service it will default to searching all those engines under that Service simultaneously.
Does this solve your problems? Let me know.
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