Search Engines

[paulmacswain]

Good evening

I thought i would ask (hopefully it is in the proper forum) if I wanted to add my own search engine to Palemoon is it possible? Thanks in advance for your response.

Paul

[van p]

In the Search Box there's a little down-pointing arrow next to (to the right of) the DDG symbol. Click that arrow.

[moonbat]

Add additional ones from the search plugins page.

Apart from this, you can add them from any other search engine while on their page by clicking the down arrow next to the search engine icon in the search bar, or even create a separate search (which will be stored as a bookmark) by rightclicking on the textbox of any search field on a page.

[paulmacswain]

Thank you very much it worked perfectly.

Paul

[Blacklab]

@moonbat: Would be grateful if you could expand on your comment Re: adding new search engines in your answer above:

Apart from this, you can add them from any other search engine while on their page by clicking the down arrow next to the search engine icon in the search bar, or even create a separate search (which will be stored as a bookmark) by rightclicking on the textbox of any search field on a page.

By 'any other search engine' I understand this to mean NOT one of the additional ones from the Pale Moon search plugin page.

I can't see how to add an external search engine's XML to Pale Moon's installed selection of search engines by "clicking the down arrow next to the search engine icon in the search bar".

If I have the right down arrow... that just opens the 'Manage Search Engines' dropdown box? Am I missing something obvious here?

(BTW - I suspect many/most users will have long ago removed the 'Search Bar' from the UI these days... I had... if interested to follow this you can find it in Pale Moon's UI 'Customise Toolbar' box and re-add to your UI for experiments!)

I can add a new external search engine's XML to Pale Moon... but only by using a more convoluted process via a neat 'make your own search plugin' XML creator such as Ready2Search.

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PS. For anyone interested there is fulsome and moderately intimidating 'how to' guide to using Ready2Search here.

There's an example of making a 'Google Verbatim' search engine made using Ready2Search in this old blog by Stephen Ostermiller here... which works and you can add his 'GV30' modified Google search engine to your Pale Moon with one click as a trial run.

You can use the Ready2Search method to add any new search engine or modify the settings of existing ones.

I principally use Ready2Search method to add my own version of DuckDuckGo search to Pale Moon... thus saving my own preferred DDG Settings as my chosen search option when highlighting text on a webpage and then using the right-click 'context menu' to search. I'm probably odd... I often wipe all cookies... which also wipes the normal DDG cookie with my preferred DDG search settings.

I also find it useful to add more search engines to the UI's right-click Context Menu using the Context Search X addon for Pale Moon... this allows you multiple search choices from the Context Menu... and the old 'Search Bar' can be removed from the UI.

[moonbat]

I can't see how to add an external search engine's XML to Pale Moon's installed selection of search engines by "clicking the down arrow next to the search engine icon in the search bar".

Search engines used to advertise the fact they have a plugin so that when you open the menu, you will see an extra option to add the current page as a search plugin. On checking again now, seems they've stopped doing it ever since Chrome became popular (and of course it doesn't have anything useful like this).

There are still a few sites like this one that let you generate a search plugin for a given site by providing the URL and some parameters.

[vannilla]

To expand on what moonbat said: websites can offer to the browser some code that can install a new search engine in the browser that will let you search something in the website.
When the website is configured like so, when you use the search bar (if you removed it I suggest reinstating it, as it's more powerful than using the address bar) you can click on the arrow and a menu will appear, containing an entry saying something like "Add <place> to search".
If you click on it you can then select the website as a search engine and when you have it selected and do a search, you will be automatically directed to the result given by the site.
As a practical example, the jisho.org website, a japanese to english dictionary, does this and you can use this method to quickly find the definition of a word without having to go to the website homepage first.

[moonbat]

As a practical example, the jisho.org website, a japanese to english dictionary, does this and you can use this method to quickly find the definition of a word without having to go to the website homepage first.

Not bad, when all the major search engines seem to have abandoned this. To make it even easier, you can assign a keyword to your search engines on the 'manage search engines' dialog, so that you can invoke them from the addressbar directly. For example I have Youtube's search plugin with the keyword 'yt' so I just type yt <search> in the addressbar to straightaway query it.

DuckDuckGo provides a poor man's version of this with their bangs feature, the difference is your query has to go to their site first before going to the target site. Useful for u⃥n⃥w⃥a⃥s⃥h⃥e⃥d⃥ ⃥m⃥a⃥s⃥s⃥e⃥s⃥ Chrome users and if you are on a mobile phone.