Add Ghacks Search To Firefox And Opera
One of the great things about owning a website with more than 4000 mostly free software related articles is the wealth of information that becomes very useful when searching for a specific software program. Instead of performing a search on a search engine users could try and search their favorite Internet website for the program instead. This can be Ghacks or any other website that is offering a search form on their website. Here is a short walkthrough on how to add a custom Ghacks search to Firefox and Opera and how to use it to search for information on that site only.
The basic principle is the same in both web browsers. The first step is to locate the search form on the website. Ghacks has the search form embedded in the sidebar on the right side of the screen. A right-click on that search form opens the context menu.
Firefox will display the entry "Add a keyword for this search" while Opera will display "Create search". Both have the same effect. They open a small popup window that requires some input to define the keyword for the search; But do not worry, it is not complicated.
Firefox:
Opera:
The important part is the addition of a keyword that can be used in the address bar in conjunction with a search term to search the website. The keyword gh for Ghacks was chosen in this case. A search would then be conducted by using the "gh term" in the address bar of the browser.
gh screenshot would search for all articles that have been indexed with the term screenshot while gh image editor would do the same for image editors. The results are displayed as if a normal site search would have been used. This is working for most sites that offer a site search and can really save some time. Other websites where this might make sense are online shops like eBay or Amazon, hardware portals and even forums or news sites.
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“the not so perfect search utility in XP”
At least it worked. Both Vista and Seven take far too much time indexing and searching on networked drives.
A search for all files with a certain string in the filename takes 3 times longer on Seven (and 4 times longer on Vista) than on XP.
The indexing service takes too much memory too.
I’ll stick to Copernic Desktop Search for now!
What a crap! My customers don’t find their documents with windows search function, even if it is almost in right front of you. Microsoft’s policy is to keep everything messy and protected, and the most stupidiest thing is to show different name for the folder than what it actually is.
Is it too much to ask, if the search function would work like in XP? Yes it is…
Good luck with Windows Search, third party software rules in this case… too.
The term negation function doesn’t work.