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[1] Submitted by: Kevin O\'Neill on Friday October 18th 2002

should the end tag noted be </SEARCH> as opposed to </search>?

[2] Submitted by: Mat @ Mycroft on Saturday October 19th 2002

To the best of my knowledge, the tags are not case sensitive. It can be </SEARCH> or </search> or even </sEaRcH> if you are so inclined.

[3] Submitted by: KW Bergman on Tuesday November 5th 2002

I am confused about the method part - this says that only the GET method can be used. But this bug claims that only POST works: http://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2175

The Status page also says that GET can't be used. Could this issue be elaborated on here perhaps?

[4] Submitted by: Julius on Tuesday November 5th 2002

The bug you mention is about searching the mycroft *pages*. It is not about the sherlock plugins.

Currently the POST method cannot be used for sherlock plugins in mozilla. However it is often possible to avoid that and use a GET method instead.

[5] Submitted by: NetVicious on Sunday December 22nd 2002

What about change referer url?

Some forms use the referer to validate input, if the referer it's not on the website the server returns error or white page

[6] Submitted by: Jesse Ruderman on Wednesday March 12th 2003

In the "method" section, a bookmarklet that contains a " character doesn't have the " escaped as ampersand-quot-semicolon. This breaks the link.

[7] Submitted by: djdub on Wednesday March 26th 2003

The encoding/charset documentation is unclear! How are queryEncoding and queryCharset different? It seems like you need to specify what the encoding of the actual ".src" file is in, and then specify how the query is supposed to be encoded when sending to the site.

[8] Submitted by: ricky on Friday May 30th 2003

How come UTF-8 is not listed as a valid charset?

[9] Submitted by: mat on Friday May 30th 2003

I don't know if it is valid or not, my understanding of the charset and encoding information is limited. The list above was taken directly out of the code for nsInternetSearchService.cpp. The only references to UTF-8 in nsInternetSearchService.cpp refer to converting it to unicode and using ISO-8859-1 as the default instead of UTF-8. If someone understands it all well and can explain it in better terms, your help is needed.

[10] Submitted by: ricky on Friday May 30th 2003

Ok, if you got it from the code, I won't contradict you, Mat. So I've experienced the problem with the altavista babelfish_ja2en plugin. Without charset, if I searched for &#26481;&#20140; (Tokyo in Japanese), it would search for ?? which yields no results. After looking at the code in the page, I saw it was UTF-8 encoded, so I added that line in the plugin. And it worked. I don't have more understanding than that, but if it works, I think we could add it to the list. Maybe mentioning that it's a special case?

[11] Submitted by: mat on Saturday May 31st 2003

Great. I'll add it then. I just wish we had someone that had a greater understanding of these parts that could explain it well.

[12] Submitted by: ricky on Monday August 4th 2003

I've just come across this post in a forum:

http://geckozone.tuxfamily.org/geckoforum/viewtopic.php?t=75#502

there's a mention of the attributes "actionbutton" and "actionbar" next to "action". Anyone has a clue what they are about?

[13] Submitted by: Mårten on Monday November 3rd 2003

Something I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is the fact that by default the name and description tags in the plugin is interpreted as beeing encoded in mac-roman.
I haven't tried it myself, but looking at the source code it seems like the tag sourceTextEncoding can be set to one of the integer values specified here
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpfe/components/search/src/nsInternetSearchService.cpp#3652
if you want to encode these tags in some other way.

[14] Submitted by: Mårten on Monday November 3rd 2003

Above somebody asked about the difference between queryEncoding and queryCharset. The values are used for the same purpose. queryCharset is used if set otherwise queryEncoding is. The values you can assign to queryCharset are any of the supported character sets of Mozilla. (Among others the ones mentioned at queryEncoding.) queryEncoding on the other hand can be assigned one of the integer values of http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpfe/components/search/src/nsInternetSearchService.cpp#3576

[15] Submitted by: k on Saturday February 21st 2004

It would be nice to have a target option here, so we can open a new tab when a search is done.

[16] Submitted by: Martijn on Friday February 27th 2004

I always put sort parameters alphabetically, so the name for my plugin was originally about midway in the list.

Appearantly is has to be the first in the list, else the name will not show in the search bar.

[17] Submitted by: raindog on Friday April 30th 2004

Is there any way to make a Mozilla search plugin that works with sites that use PATH_INFO rather than POST or GET form fields to run your query? e.g.

profiles.yahoo.com/%s

or

slashdot.org/~%s

where %s in both cases is a user ID.

[18] Submitted by: mat @ mycroft on Monday May 3rd 2004

Re: [17]

No, there is not a way to make a generic plugin for all to use in that way. You can make your own personal search plugin with your user ID in it. Take a look at the alsomatch tag.

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/deepdocs/browsertag.html#alsomatch

Add your personal result URL to the alsomatch tag of the plugin you wish to personalize.

[19] Submitted by: Dave Higgins on Wednesday June 23rd 2004

Is POST working yet? Gutenberg.net have recently changed their search from GET to POST and I'd like to get it working.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040615 Firefox/0.9

[20] Submitted by: Brian on Sunday 19th September 2004 at 01:26 -0400

I'm haveing trouble figureing out the searchform and action fields. For example I want to make it search a forum useing the forum's search feature. I have both the searchform and the action set to the forums search page: http://forums.randomwebsitefiller.com/search.php and when I run the validator it fills in what I searched for in the search box but it doesn't search, to search it requires and addition press of the enter button/click on the search now button. I've tryed setting the input name to the name of the search now button but it doesn't work because it looks in the search feild for the search results.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040911 Firefox/0.10

[21] Submitted by: Domolego Constantine on Monday 20th September 2004 at 07:22 -0400

How about POST method? Some servers accept only POST and plugins does not work :(

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

[22] Submitted by: haya on Thursday 30th September 2004 at 15:49 -0400

how can let the search:engine name display non-english (eg. chinese or japanese) ?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

[23] Submitted by: Mårten on Monday 4th October 2004 at 14:20 -0400

I answered this in comment 13. Anyway, set the tag
sourceTextEncoding to a suitable integer listed here
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpfe/components/search/src/nsInternetSearchService.cpp#3670

In your case probably 1 for Shift_JIS or 2 for Big5.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10

[24] Submitted by: Kevin on Saturday 9th October 2004 at 01:25 -0400

I am trying to get the search result to open in a new window. I figured putting target="new" into the section would work, but it does not seem to be working. Any ideas???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

[25] Submitted by: Spike411 on Sunday 14th November 2004 at 10:54 -0500

And why don't you use standard mozilla/firefox keys, instead of target=...?
For example ALT+ENTER to open results in a new tab. (it may depend on your config)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041109 Panda cervena/100% (Spike is Da MAN!)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041109 Panda cervena/100% (Spike is Da MAN!)

[26] Submitted by: cgcbolo on Thursday 13th January 2005 at 06:06 -0500

sorry,
I tried thing you said in #c13 and #c23 about sourceTextEncoding but I thing it doesn't work.

What I'm doing wrong?, thank you

------
search
name="Telenotícies"
sourceTextEncoding="513"
------

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3

[27] Submitted by: dogcow on Friday 29th April 2005 at 18:25 -0400

name="Google"

Is there a way to add the search string (from the selection) to the context menu?

say, for google you would get google "mycrof" when you right click (if mycrof is selected) instead of just google.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

[28] Submitted by: Karl-Josef on Tuesday 3rd May 2005 at 08:40 -0400

For searching the word 'great' the search URL should be:

www.example.com/ALEPH/-/ext-find?base=kol01&find=WRD=great

In the source I've:

action="http://www.example.com/ALEPH/-/ext-find"

but as a result I only got the search URL:

www.example.com/ALEPH/-/ext-find?base=kol01&find=WRD=

without the search word ('great').

Any hints how to construct such a search URL?

Best regards,

Karl-Josef

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; de-DE; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3 Mnenhy/0.7.1

[29] Submitted by: Karl-Josef on Tuesday 3rd May 2005 at 08:42 -0400

A little correction, of course the source is:

action="http://aleph1.uni-koblenz.de/ALEPH/-/ext-find"

and

input name="base" value="kol01"
input name="find" user

- Karl-Josef

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; de-DE; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3 Mnenhy/0.7.1

[30] Submitted by: Karl-Josef on Tuesday 3rd May 2005 at 08:45 -0400

The system seems to filter HTML in posts,
so it should be:

input name="base" value="kol01"
input name="find" value= "WRD=" user

- Karl-Josef

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; de-DE; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3 Mnenhy/0.7.1

[31] Submitted by: Mårten Svantesson on Thursday 12th May 2005 at 11:25 -0400

Have you tried to write it like this?

input name="base" value="kol01"
input name="find=WRD" user

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050416 Fedora/1.0.3-1.3.1 Firefox/1.0.3

[32] Submitted by: Karl-Josef on Sunday 15th May 2005 at 08:19 -0400

Thanks, that's the right solution.

- Karl-Josef

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

[33] Submitted by: Georges on Friday 20th May 2005 at 06:27 -0400

In FireFox, is it possible to make the result of the search in the sidebar rather than the main window? Since some are dictionaries, it would be great if the results would appear on the left side of the current web page rather than switching back and forth.

Example of implementation:

By default (no attribute "target"), the results would be in window, like now.

Since the results may be supposed to appear in some frame, clicking on one of the links in the results pages may open another window, so when "target" is provided in , then it would override the target in the links of the results.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1

[34] Submitted by: Georges on Friday 20th May 2005 at 06:35 -0400

Example of implementation: attribute output="_sidebar" in search element.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1

[35] Submitted by: localhost on Sunday 12th June 2005 at 16:07 -0400

In reply to #33 and #34
This is a feature not available to Firefox. The Mozilla Suite does has this feature and a major part of the plugins is coded to support the sidebar. The project http://searchsidebar.mozdev.org/ was set up to get the sidebar search back to Firefox. Unfortunately this project is kinda stopped at the moment.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

[36] Submitted by: maestrod on Thursday 14th July 2005 at 10:50 -0400

I am curious as to whether specifying the value for a radio button is possible? I have been trying to do it for a particular search, but the results always seem to ignore the value I add.

input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search"
input name="search_keywords" user
input name="search_terms" value="all"

"search_keywords" is a text type (so it works fine), but "search_terms" is a radio button (there are two '"search_terms" radio buttons' on the page) and the options for values are "all" or "any." Default is "any" and I would like to specify "all". Whenever I use the above code it does not achieved the needed results.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

[37] Submitted by: dazzle on Friday 15th July 2005 at 03:25 -0400

In reply to #33/#34

I've been working on the search sidebar project (http://searchsidebar.mozdev.org) and now have it displaying sidebar results in single and multi search modes - where specified by the search plugins. Give it a try to see if it meets your needs.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5

[38] Submitted by: MBJr. on Monday 12th September 2005 at 02:10 -0400

Hi there,

Any ways to create multiple seach possibilities?
Let's say I want to search for "something1" in a tab and "somthing2" in another tab. Any ways to supply them to the search form as something1;something2 so it detects I'm actually looking for 2 different searches instead if passing ther ";" as a "%3B" in the URL :P.

Thanks

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6 (ax)

[39] Submitted by: Rolando Garza on Wednesday 23rd November 2005 at 19:41 -0500

I've already contributed several search extensions, but I can't figure out how to get an output like this:

http://example.com/search/query

Where 'query' is what the user is searching for. Is that using a POST method? I tried using the bookmarklet that turns post to gets, but didn't help much (there are no question marks nor equalto signs in the address).

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

[40] Submitted by: ricky @ mycroft on Thursday 24th November 2005 at 01:48 -0500

In RE: to #39

Rolando, no this is not what is called a post-method. It's also a get method, but actually not a form submission. If the search form of the site (and here you'll have to check out the html code) contains input-fields, then normally the plugin should be doable. You won't however get sidebar results, since the URL to which the form submits is redirected to the plain url form as you mention.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

[41] Submitted by: andreas on Friday 6th January 2006 at 10:28 -0500

re #39 und #40

I'm also looking for a way to generate ULRs like the one mentioned in #39. The idea is to go directly to a product page of any given Nokia mobile phone. Normaly, you can enter e.g.

http://www.nokia.com/770

if you want to get information on the Nokia 770 device. Can I use the search plugin to generate URLs like that?

thanx for any help

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6

[42] Submitted by: Lyfia on Monday 23rd January 2006 at 04:08 -0500

The source code in:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpfe/components/search/src/nsInternetSearchService.cpp#3670
is too long to render. So I extracted the list from the source code and listed it below.

sourceTextEncoding="0" //x-mac-roman
sourceTextEncoding="1" //Shift_JIS
sourceTextEncoding="2" //Big5
sourceTextEncoding="3" //EUC-KR
sourceTextEncoding="4" //X-MAC-ARABIC
sourceTextEncoding="5" //X-MAC-HEBREW
sourceTextEncoding="6" //X-MAC-GREEK
sourceTextEncoding="7" //X-MAC-CYRILLIC
sourceTextEncoding="8" //not used
sourceTextEncoding="9" //X-MAC-DEVANAGARI
sourceTextEncoding="10" //X-MAC-GURMUKHI
sourceTextEncoding="11" //X-MAC-GUJARATI
sourceTextEncoding="12" //X-MAC-ORIYA
sourceTextEncoding="13" //X-MAC-BENGALI
sourceTextEncoding="14" //X-MAC-TAMIL
sourceTextEncoding="15" //X-MAC-TELUGU
sourceTextEncoding="16" //X-MAC-KANNADA
sourceTextEncoding="17" //X-MAC-MALAYALAM
sourceTextEncoding="18" //X-MAC-SINHALESE
sourceTextEncoding="19" //X-MAC-BURMESE
sourceTextEncoding="20" //X-MAC-KHMER
sourceTextEncoding="21" //X-MAC-THAI
sourceTextEncoding="22" //X-MAC-LAOTIAN
sourceTextEncoding="23" //X-MAC-GEORGIAN
sourceTextEncoding="24" //X-MAC-ARMENIAN
sourceTextEncoding="25" //GB2312
sourceTextEncoding="26" //X-MAC-TIBETAN
sourceTextEncoding="27" //X-MAC-MONGOLIAN
sourceTextEncoding="28" //X-MAC-ETHIOPIC
sourceTextEncoding="29" //X-MAC-CENTRALEURROMAN
sourceTextEncoding="30" //X-MAC-VIETNAMESE
sourceTextEncoding="32" //X-MAC-EXTARABIC

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

[43] Submitted by: mattb on Wednesday 8th February 2006 at 10:21 -0500

Reply to [41]:

Why not just yell at Nokia to use a get method page?

nokia.co/phone.php?product=770

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50215)

[44] Submitted by: andreas on Tuesday 21st February 2006 at 08:14 -0500

Reply to [43]:

... because it's probably much easier to adapt the source code (or even program a new plugin for Firefox) then telling one of the world's top mobile phone manufacture to change their web site ;)

I can't make them change anything they do or don't do, I can only work with what I've got and what they provide. Maybe I'll look into programming an extension for Firefox to provide that functionality, we'll see...

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6

[45] Submitted by: porcupine on Wednesday 8th March 2006 at 16:37 -0500

In previous versions of Firefox, not entering any data in the search box and hitting [enter] would bring me to the URL listed in searchForm. Now, it brings me to the server's default page.

Is this a bug?

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

[46] Submitted by: Prateek on Thursday 23rd March 2006 at 08:02 -0500

Hi,
Is there any way to develop a search engine which can do multiple gets..i mean do a GET and obtain a key, do a search and get an ID and use that ID to get the results.This will need multiple get/search from the extension.

If anyone has any idea on this please inform me asap. Its kind of urgent. My mail id is prateekjain@gmail.com

Thanks,
Prateek

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

[47] Submitted by: Bob on Saturday 8th April 2006 at 21:12 -0400

I've got a question: is there any way to keep firefox from escaping characters? For instance, http://www.google.com/ becomes http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F in most search plugins.

For most search engines, this isn't a problem, but for the one I'm using it is. Any ideas?

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50215)

[48] Submitted by: Charles at Mycroft on Sunday 9th April 2006 at 13:02 -0400

45... I'm not sure if you would call it a bug - but I consider it worse behaviour... I think this will change for Fx 2.

46... No, not using the standard search box (I'm sure you could develop something from scratch that would do it)

47... Not as far as I'm aware - though I'm not sure if it is Firefox doing something wrong or if it's the search engine at the other end. This is why the Tinyurl (Make Link) plugin doesn't work (well unless the url is just www.example.com or something which rather defeats the purpose)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

[49] Submitted by: Tamara on Sunday 30th April 2006 at 16:34 -0400

Does anyone know of a way to implement the Google search feature "site:" so that we can make a search engine for any site?

I don't mean that the user has to put which site he/she wants to search, but that we can make a site-specific search engine for any site, even if that site doesn't have one.

Thanks.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2

[50] Submitted by: Malte Kraus on Tuesday 2nd May 2006 at 09:55 -0400

I made a search plugin that searches for Firefox extensinos on different web sites some time ago. Maybe this helps you:

# Firefox-Erweiterungen Searchplugin for Mozilla/Netscape6+ by firefox@maltekraus.de
# Version 1.0
# Last update: 21 January 2006

It uses the text input field from the normal search and one from the advanced search, so this is not possible with other search engines.
At least not before Firefox 2.0 supports OpenSearch which should be able to do this less "hacky".

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20060430 BonEcho/2.0a1

[51] Submitted by: Charles at Mycroft on Tuesday 2nd May 2006 at 12:04 -0400

Google are good enough to provide their own hack... they seem to accept multipl q parameters... see some of these:

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=3rd+party&sherlock=yes&submitform=Search

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2

[52] Submitted by: Otto de Voogd on Thursday 25th May 2006 at 05:57 -0400

49:
I just completed an online tool that can generate a search plugin for any site using Google:
http://www.7is7.com/software/firefox/sitesearch.html

The trick is to use the sitesearch and domains parameter when querying Google.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060504 Fedora/1.5.0.3-1.1.fc5 Firefox/1.5.0.3 pango-text

[53] Submitted by: LouCypher on Sunday 14th January 2007 at 13:28 -0800

#49

You can add "sitesearch" parameter

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a2pre) Gecko/20061229 Minefield/3.0a2pre