My blog has been syndicated in planet KDE for quite a long time. But I haven’t really write a blog (again). Well, I think this might be a good time to start it again. First of all, I need to introduce myself, I was one of KDE Google SoC students in 2007 and 2008. I was working for KOffice for both of the Google SoCs.
But this time I won’t talk about KOffice, but instead about Konqueror. Few weeks ago I implemented a Google suggestion feature for Konqueror searchbar (because I miss that feature from FF – and also inspired by this and this). It was quite a simple patch, and it only worked for Google suggestion API. After submitting the patch to kfm-devel list, Germain Garand (the KHTML guru) suggested that I need to make this improvement more generic, meaning that it should be able to use other search suggestion engines apart from Google. I have finished the improvement about two months ago, but because of the freeze I couldn’t commit it. But since trunk is open again for KDE 4.4, I just committed this improvement to the searchbar plugin source code in KDE extragear.
Currently it only supports Google (with parser from Ariya Hidayat – thanks Ariya!) , but I’m working on Yahoo suggestion engine. Other suggestion engines can be added easily as well (Bing anyone? – If it has any :p).
Also, still on my TODO list: A checkbox to enable/disable this feature.
Edit: I just found out there is something called OpenSearch. Seems that this can be used to create even more general engine without any need to write code for any provider specific parser. I’ll look into that tomorrow.
Edit 2: Bing also has suggestion API! (Not that I’m fan of Bing :p I’m still a google fan)
Nice feature!
It would also be nice to have this feature in combination with web shortcuts. Would this be possible?
@job:
Thanks for the comment. It should be possible, but we’ll need to change some part of the KDE webshortcut filter. But why would you want that? The search suggestion API only throws you raw XML / raw JSON, which is not very nice presented in the Konqueror browser.
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Hi fredy,
Arora is using the opensearch engine. You can take a look at the source codes:
http://code.google.com/p/arora/
Good luck, my friend 🙂
PS: I’m also familiarizing myself with Qt, hoping to contribute to KDE some day. Hard to find time 😛
Thanks Alvin! Last time I checked Arora source code, it didn’t contain any opensearch implementation. Seems that they just added this feature, nice!
P.S.: KDE always welcomes new contribution 🙂 And would it be nice if we can have our local KDE user group here in Sg?
Nice indeed.
However, one should consider the security/privacy implications, as it is effectively a real time key logger. At least make that clear to the user.
Hmm… you’re right, I’ve added a checkbox to enable/disable this feature, but how to notify the user is another thing. Any idea will be greatly appreciated 🙂
Hi,
I generally don’t use the search bar, I use the url bar for searching directly. Do you have plans for integrating your work with the url bar too?
Good stuff! Always nice to know that the little code I wrote is useful for many programs 🙂
Nice, we got a feature from KDE 3 back 🙂
@miro:
You mean like when I type gg something, the location bar fires a request to the suggestion service? I don’t have that plan currently, but that would be cool. Maybe this can be linked to Edulix’s GSoC for konqueror? Maybe, I don’t know :p
@Ariya:
Thanks for the comment and thanks again for the code snippet 🙂
@kdepepo:
As far as I know, KDE 3 didn’t have this feature, or do I miss something?
It would be grate to see it in KRunner.
Hi Fredy, it’s nice to see you posting on your blog again. It looks like a great feature that you’ve added 🙂
Hi Eugene,
Thanks for the comment, I was quite surprised that you know my blog 😀
Superb site you have here but I was wondering if
you knew of any user discussion forums that cover the same topics discussed here?
I’d really love to be a part of online community where I can get advice from other experienced individuals that share the same interest. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Cheers!
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Thanks and best of luck.