Firefox - Importing Epiphany’s Custom Search Engine’s

Epiphany has a great feature and because of this and this and this alone, I might just return to it. No, really. This is just what got me into Epiphany in the first place - the bare bones, no frills, unix-like application. It’s best feature is the location bar that can double as a web search tool.

So I began playing in Firefox with a couple lookups. It is a process I didnt’ miss: click the search bar, type in the topic to search, click the search engine button, select the search engine, hit return, hit return.

Epiphany has the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar ticked “Smart Bookmarks“. In Epiphany the process goes: type the search in location bar, arrow key to the search engine, return.

Unfortunately, Firefox has no way of replicating this behavior of Epiphany, custom searches though can be built in Firefox without too much difficulty.

To add custom searches in Firefox a good method is to find whatever search engines that match Epiphany’s. One could look through Firefox 3’s terrific link for custom searchs but one may better look at the mozdev list.

For quick reference to Epiphany’s smart bookmarks use grep:

grep -B 2 smartlink ~/.gnome2/epiphany/bookmarks.rdf | less

For Epiphany where custom search engines where created and there are no equivalents already built, new custom searchs can be easily made. Mozilla has a guide to build custom search engines plugins and the basic rules for them. The Mozilla developer page is pretty thorough though and takes a bit to learn, a faster option is to look at the documentation links at botom of the page that point to a couple websites that can generate one. I personally tried searchplugins.net. Searchplugins.net just needs a URL string from a search with TEST as the term.

Thats it! This will be able to get all the custom searchs back into Firefox.

Tip:

I find myself using Googles site search alot, I find it a good way to look up answers on a website whos built-in search features are lacking. In google typing, “site:ubuntuforums.org echo tee” will, for example, search Ubuntu Forums for echo and tee. A URL for searchplugins with “site:TEST” in a Google search will generate a custom search engine where just typing “ubuntuforums.org echo tee” will lookup via google.

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Tomorrow I’ll be putting up a couple of my Gentoo scripts that I use on regular basis.