Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:46 am Post subject: Easier Wiki Searching?
With all the good information going into the wiki, I find I'm refering to it more and more in my posts here, and I'm wondering if there's a way to speed up my searching.
Right now I open a new Tab in Firefox, select the Wiki main page bookmark, and enter my search in the search box.
I use Butler, and for many sites I can create a custom Search 'engine' based on the url that shows up in the browser after a search. Here are the instructions:
Code:
you need to find out the string before and after the search terms that the site in question uses. Do this by going to the site and searching for anything, then on the results page copy the text to the left of your search query. Then in Butler paste it into the URL prefix field for the engine you have created and selected. Then copy the text from the right of your query and paste it into the URL suffix field in Butler.
But when I search the wiki, I don't see a url that fits the description. (Because it uses php, maybe??).
Is there a relatively easy way to create a search engine either in Butler or in Firefox?
Lorinda
Last edited by Lorinda on Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:09 pm; edited 1 time in total
In Gecko browsers, replace LorindaIsTheBest with %s when creating a bookmark search. Give it a keyword/shortcut, like neowiki, and type neowiki searchterm in your location bar.
I don't know how to do it in Firefox's toolbar search field for sure, as they keep changing the architecture left and right
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 12:23 pm Post subject:
Thanks so much, Smokey! I was able to configure Butler to do the search. Firefox is not so user friendly for creating your own search engines. Besides, this way I can assign the search box a keyboard shortcut and it will open in a new tab rather than using the tab I have open.
Now why do I have a feeling I should go prepare a sermon or a Bible study on humility?
Thanks Smokey. It works fine in Safari and Camino. And if you put the bookmark in the bookmarks bar, Apple provides automatically a shortcut of the type Cmd-x, where x is a number which indicates the rank of the bookmark in the bar.
Lorinda, did you try Camino? It's more user friendly and more Mac-like than Firefox. I like it; the only thing which bothers me is that I can't disable the automatic spellchecking. And it checks spelling only in English, so when I write French (it occurs ), I get all my words underlined with a red wavy line…
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 6:35 am Post subject:
jgd wrote:
Lorinda, did you try Camino? It's more user friendly and more Mac-like than Firefox.
No, I haven't tried Camino. Seems like I looked at it once, and it didn't have some feature I wanted...can't remember what it is now. I went with Firefox in part because I used to play Utopia, and there was a Utopia extension for Firefox that was very helpful. I'd also seen it talked about in MacWorld a lot.
By in large, I'm pretty happy with Firefox. While I can't easily build my own search engine for the search bar, there are lots of pre-made ones that I find very helpful.
If I ever get frustrated with Firefox, I'll probably look at Camino again.
Note that since we last discussed things here, Firefox has stabilized on OpenSearch for adding search engines to its toolbar search field and Camino has adopted that standard as well, and MediaWiki creates a OpenSearch plugin by default on all MediaWikis (like NeoWiki).
That means if you visit the NeoWiki in Camino or Firefox, you should see a little notification in the search field (Firefox notification) that there's a search engine available. Click on the notification, which will drop down a menu that includes an item like "Add 'NeoWiki (English)'" to add that search engine.
The only drawback is that the search plugin defaults to the non-fulltext search (i.e., the "Go" button in the wiki's left-side search field as opposed to the "Search" button), but it still pulls up text matches.
Of course also since we last posted here Patrick has added a Google search box to all of Neooffice.org; that search is sometimes better and sometimes worse, depending on what you're looking for (and depending on whether you want to restrict your search to one site or to search all of NeoOffice.org).
As with anything, it helps to know what you're looking for If you're looking for something on the wiki with a set of terms and don't get any hits, be sure to let us know. If the article exists, we can add some of your search terms to it to make it more discoverable, and if the article does not exist, we might be able to write it
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 7:36 pm Post subject:
Thanks, so much, Smokey! Now I have two ways to search. In my case, I like that the Firefox engine works from the Go box. Sometimes I want to go to a specific page whose name I know; with my Butler search engine, I get the search results first and then have to click the link. Now I can go right to the page quickly from the Firefox search box. The best of both worlds!
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