Firefox:Search:Scratch Pad

Perhaps a clear button à la iTunes' X button.

Comments Bugmenot

Maybe we should dump searchbar plugins and use the entries in the Quick Search Folder for the search bar, as it will automatically give the user the ability to orgranize (add, delete and sort, right now there is no obvious way for the user to remove searchbar plugins) his/her search entries. It also allows the user to make use of the "Add a Keyword for this Search..." context menu. Lastly, I believe having to maintain two separate search mechanisms is just too much work.

Comments charred

you can delete the searchbar plugins by going to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins and deleting the ones you no longer want

Comments Grauw

Bugmenot: I believe the search keyword functionality doesn�t deal well with non-ASCII search strings, whose encoding depends on the acceptable encoding of the search page. This could by the way be fixed by looking at the accept-encoding attribute on the form, and if that is not present, the page encoding, and storing that together with the keyword.

Comments Rasselas21

Hi, Sorry if I didn't add this comment correctly. Anyways... I feel that the FF search engine is very versatile, it can do almost anything though extensability, however, one thing it still fails to do... be able to do a "Search this site" easily. Know what I mean? Like you want to search ALL of the mozilla.com site (and you might be on "mozill.com/help/faq" or such, not the root page)... you can go to google and do such an "advanced" search (have to navigate there unless its in your bookmarks, which is tedious as well) by copying the url and pasting and editing it in the appropriate field (I forget if editing it is necessary). OR you can just install the googlebar extension (or some other bloated toolbar) and EASILY do a "search for word/phrase on site". Problem with that? The toolbar is bloated -- slows FF performance, hogs up toolbar space, and well... its extraneous as there is already a native search plugin in FF that does EVERYTHING else. Well, if you create a plugin to do so. The problem? You CAN'T create (well, rather several have tried and none succeeded) such a site search plugin with the native search engine. It merely doesn't support the process/code to do so. It would be a small fix, with the big effect that you no-longer need to download a toolbar (such as googlebar... which only searches google mind you) to do a site search, or to navigate to google's advanced search to do it (and copy/paste of url)... Rather it would be simple... just download a new plugin that someone could then create to do a site search with google or yahoo... etc (whichever search engines support site searches that is). Now, it is true that you can manually type "site search: (type.url.here.) (type-keywords-here) into the native search plugin, but who wants to do that? Its just a little code touch up that is necessary in my opinion for such an added convenience. Then download some extensions that enhance the NATIVE search engine, and voila! One other suggestion... have the option of searching your bookmarks/history/places/etc with the search engine, or from the urlbar (though there is an extension that can already do that from the urlbar). Later and thanks.

===== Answer to Rasselas21 =====

If I have understood you correctly, you try to limit your google search on a certain site. This is simply done by entering the search text "site:mozilla.org myKeyword1 myKeyword2". This is not a feature of firefox but google (and can be studied on google's help pages). I don't think that a search technique highly customized for a single search engine like google makes sense. Users should be familiar with using their favourite search engines.

Comments Story Weaver

Following on from the idea of easy searching of sites, I would like to see a semantic plugin installer. By this I mean that instead of every web site having to have a link on their page somewhere saying "get our firefox search plugin here", it could be defined in the same kind of way that RSS feeds are currently. So whenever you visited a website that had it's own search plugin (eg. Amazon's A9 plugin) an icon would appear - perhaps in the location bar, as for RSS - and it would simply be a matter of clicking to install it.

Obviously this icon wouldn't show if you already had the search plugin installed. The html might be something like: <link href="http://sitedomain.com/searchplugin.src" rel="alternate" title="This site's searchplugin" type="application/mycroft-searchplugin" />

Isn't this already in Firefox 2.0? RyanJones 06:11, 5 October 2006 (PDT)