Sunday, January 4, 2009

custom search in maxthon 2

Maxthon is my favorite internet browser and one of its greatest features is the custom search ability. You can run a search in (almost) any site just by writing your query to the address bar and hitting enter. Let's see how it is done.

Go to the website in which you'd like to search your query. In our example, the website is mininova which is a torrent search engine.


Write an arbitrary query to the search box. We use "Queen" as query. Then, hit the search button.

mininovaNow that the search results are in hand, take a look at the address bar.



mininova


You can see that "http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=Queen" is written in the address bar. This means that, for running a different search all we have to do is changing the word "Queen" with the new query (e.g. http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=Savatage) and hit enter to load the new url. But there is an easier alternative that'll automate our search so we won't have to write that long url everytime we want to search a torrent.

Now open maxthon > tools > maxthon setup center and choose search tab and click on "add item". You'll see a row like this:

mininovaFirst textbox is the title. You can choose something arbitrary. I choose "Torrent" in our example. The second textbox is alias. We will choose an alias for the search engine which will reduce the necessary amount of typing. I choose "t" (for torrent). So I will be able to do a custom search with the syntax "t myQuery". The third one is the url that we discovered in previous steps. It was "http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=Queen" for our example. We will replace our example query by "%us" which will give us http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=%us
in our example. I replace "Queen" with "%us" and write the new url in the corresponding textbox and then click on save.

mininova

Now, you can search a torrent by writing "t Query" to the address bar and hitting enter. Bon appétit!