Shortwave Search.

Monday 07 July, 2008

A command-based Firefox search plugin for Shaun Inman’s Shortwave.

After spending a little time getting up to speed in creating Firefox Search Plugins, I’ve crafted a Mozilla search plugin to drive Shaun Inman’s Shortwave, a command based online search tool.

“Shortwave is an extensible quick-search and shortcut system like Firefox’s Smart Keywords or Safari Stand’s Quick Search..”

The bookmarklet is great concept and is highly portable. However developers have spent time successively removing bookmark keyboard commands from each new Firefox version. Shortwave Search integrates functionality back it into the built-in Firefox search function.

Quick, Robin, to the Install.

You can install the default version, which uses the Shortwave hosted default search from here (fixed!):

›› Install Shortwave.

I’ve added the search to the un-official official search engines at Mozilla HQ:

›› Shortwave search addon at mozilla.org.

Alternatively (or if the above links do not automatically add the search) save the following XML file to the appropriate searchplugins folder, as listed here, then restart your browser.

Making it BIGGER.

If you have created your own custom waves.txt and would prefer to use that by defualt, then edit the above linked shortwaveapp.xml and append the following after {searchterms}:

&s=http://yourdomainname.com/path/to/waves.txt

Note — I have included an example (commented) for a self-hosted waves.txt in the manual download verson above, for further reference.

Which button, Jim?

You can prefix any search terms with the desired action, entering help will present the currently defined commands — for example prefixing a search with g will trigger a google search. Conversely prefixing the same search with a would ask the same question to Amazon.

Using the built-in Control + K keyboard combo (Cmd + K if you’re in Mac land) makes that search even faster.

To make Shortwave the default browser search engine, browse to about:config (you may be asked to confirm ok) and set the following Firefox pref to Shortwave:

Finally and in conclusion.

This is a reasonably simple implementation — it should work in Firefox and most other Mozilla based browsers that support the OpenSearch standard.

Special thanks also go to Mr Inman for developing this brilliant tool and for the permission to share the search plugin.