Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Mozilla & Google behind the scenes payola

[Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl>]

Michael Kintzios schreef:

> [OT]
> Holly, you mention that you have a zillion search engines incorporated
> in your browser . . . 8O
> Where do you get them from?  How can these be added to a browser?
> [/OT]

The vast majority of them come from mozdev.org itself. If you click the
search engine button (the Google logo, in this case), you get a
drop-down list of available search engines (as you probably know,
Firefox includes several by default other than Google-- Amazon.com,
Creative Commons, Ebay, Yahoo, and dictionary.com). At the bottom of
this list there is an entry "More (or "Add) search engines", which, if
clicked, opens http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html . On this page,
you can find a whole lot of search engine plugins for any purpose--
mostly for specific sites or purposes, including Gentoo Packages
(packages.gentoo.org), Gentoo Bugzilla, by both summary (word/name) and
 bug #, the Gentoo Forums, Gentoo-Portage, and the Gentoo Wiki (although
all of these engines are not necessarily where you'd expect if you go
through the listing, but putting 'Gentoo' in the page's search box will
bring them all up). Debian also has some engine plugins, as does
Mandrake (just one). Not to mention various dictionaries in many
languages, shopping sites, and other special interest categories. Also,
a few sites that I visit have plugins that have not (yet) been accepted
by Firefox, and so are available from the website itself. You may also
find this to be the case.

There are two caveats:

1. this may have changed, but before the recent 'upgrade every day'
period (where Firefox was being revised every day over the course of 4
days), the folder /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox/searchplugins (now
/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/searchplugins) was a root-only folder, meaning
that you had to install search engine plugins as root. It also meant
that an upgrade would remove all your installed plugins, restoring the 5
default plugins. There are Mozilla bugs 'open' for this issue, but I
don't know their current status. The bugs themselves are linked in the
thread of the MozillaZine forums I link to below.

I solved this by a) changing the permissions of the searchplugins folder
so that I could write to it as a user, so I could install search engines
as a user; b) once installed, copying the searchplugins folder to /root
as a backup, so that if an upgrade wiped the folder, I could just copy
it back.


2) Search plugin order is rather random, which can be a problem if you
have a lot of search plugins. You can, however, set the order of your
search plugins. I set them up in groups of similar type, in order of
likelihood of use, with Google Linux-- rather than Google Main-- as
first (because my Google searches are more likely Linux-specific than
'general'). Google itself is second, and the IMDB is third, since I'm
always running to my computer during commercials to get a list of actors
in the movie I'm watching -- "I know her/him from *somewhere*, but...."
Then dictionaries/thesauri (in two languages), then Gentoo-specific
engines, then other Linux engines-- LQF has a Firefox search plugin, did
you know?-- and so on.

The way to do this is to set up a user.js  (easy with the ChromEdit
plugin), and is documented on the MozillaZine forums here:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=177335 (a summary is in
the first post, more detailed instructions on page 5, see the post by
Roger77, which gives the format for the entries). The nice thing about
this is that user.js is in your profile folder, thus is unaffected by an
upgrade, so once you restore your backup plugins (if that's still
necessary), the reinstalled plugins will be in the correct order (your
order, in other words).

Anyway, the search box is one of my favorite features of Firefox. I
watch my bf (a dedicated Mozilla Windows user) typing 'synonym cadence'
in the *Google* Bar because he's trying to remember a(n English) word
for a kind of poetic rythmic title (which turned out to be
'alliteration', which he remembered himself after throwing a snit
because the help he had asked me for was in some way unsatisfactory. The
point being, Google didn't lead him to the answer, but a targeted search
from an appropriate site might have), and regretting that he won't even
try Firefox, where he could just change the search engine to
thesaurus.com (or InterGlot Synonym NL), type the word and have the
specific search results he needed in many fewer steps.

But to each his or her own. I like efficency, and the ability to
customize the search box helps me gain more efficiency in my searches.

Holly
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