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Feb 14

CyberSearch 1.0.2: Pull Up Google Results Page Faster

This article was written on August 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

cybersearch 102.png Another day, another CyberSearch release. 😉 Over the weekend I had some time to work on a new CyberSearch feature that I’ve periodically received requests for. Like most features I had to think this one through to ensure that it wouldn’t interfere with the built-in Firefox keyword system.

So what have I added? In CyberSearch 1.0 you might recall that I added an entry onto the bottom of every search results list that would take you to the Google results page. Now we’re making it even easier for you to pull up the Google results page!

When CyberSearch recognizes that you’ve typed in a keyword or domain followed by the Enter key (or Go button) it will instantly take you to the Google search page that shows the same results you were looking at in the address bar. Obviously if you select a result from the drop-down list this feature will be ignored, but pressing Enter without selecting an item from the menu will pull up the Google results page.

This option comes enabled by default, but can quickly be disabled in the settings. You’ll find the option in the General tab:

enter goes to google.png

Keywords that have already been assigned in the browser’s search box will take precedence over any of the ones from our extension. The extension, however, does not look at the keywords you’ve created in your bookmarks, which means CyberSearch will override any of those. For that reason we recommend transitioning your bookmark keywords over to the search box, and I’ve found that the Add to Search Bar extension is useful in doing just that since it will let you add any search box from any site.

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Feb 14

CyberSearch Publicly Available on Mozilla Add-ons

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on September 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

It’s taken a few months, but I’m happy to announce that anyone can install our homegrown CyberSearch extension for Firefox without needing a Mozilla account. Just yesterday our extension got pushed out of the sandbox, and a big thanks goes out to all of the CyberSearch users who took the time to leave a review. The average rating from our 54 views is a 4.70 out of 5.00, and that means we have some very satisfied users.

The stats for our add-on are publicly available as well, which means you can follow how many downloads and active users there are for CyberSearch. You can also break it down even further to see things like which operating system people are using with the extension. As of right now there are 3,200+ of you who have our extension installed.

At some point I’d like to see CyberSearch become a recommended add-on by Mozilla, and possibly even get some recognition on the add-ons homepage. I’m thinking it will be a little while before that happens though, but I’m optimistic.

I’d also like to give a big thanks to the Mozilla add-on editor who approved our extension!

Get CyberSearch for Firefox
CyberSearch Homepage

Oct 19

Why the CyberSearch Extension has been Discontinued

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on March 22, 2011 by CyberNet.

I’ve been getting at least a dozen emails a day asking when the CyberSearch extension would be getting updated for Firefox 4, but I have some bad news for everyone. Our extension was made possible thanks to Google’s Web Search API, but they deprecated it back in November 2010 in favor of a new JSON Custom Search API. From a developer’s point of view this kind of thing happens all the time… old technologies are replaced with new technologies. Generally these improvements are for the better, but in this case they put some restrictions in place for anyone using the new API:

Usage is free for all users, up to 100 queries per day. […] Any usage beyond the free usage quota will fail if you are not signed up for billing. Once you have enabled billing, you will be billed for all requests at the rate of $5 per 1000 queries, for up to 10,000 queries per day. If you need additional quota, please request additional quota from the console.

The CyberSearch extension basically performs a query every time you pause for a second while typing in the Firefox address bar. I’d estimate that the 100-query limit they are imposing will be hit by our extension every second given that there are over 80k daily users. So it would likely cost us thousands of dollars a day to keep this running… assuming Google would even approve a rate limit as high as what we’d need. Since we don’t make any money off the extension you can see how that isn’t really feasible.

So why is CyberSearch still (intermittently) working for some people? Google’s blog post from last November says that they are in the process of phasing out the older APIs, and as a result they are “tightening up the enforcement of the rate limits” as time goes on. Unfortunately that means you will likely see the extension inconsistently working, and that has been the root cause of 99% of bug reports being submitted to us. In my tests about half of all requests being made would return an error saying the extension exceeded the rate limit quota.

Thanks to everyone who provided support and troubleshooting during the development of CyberSearch! It was a fun ride, but unless Google changes their policy this will have to be the end of the road.

Oct 05

CyberSearch 0.9.9: Better Icon Management, “Smart” Keywords, and More

Posted in: Today's Chili

This article was written on July 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

cybersearch 099.png Here you thought that the only big announcements today were going to be from Apple. Looks like you were wrong! We’ve got another new version of our CyberSearch Firefox extension, and this time it packs more than just bug fixes.

P.S. I apologize for releasing these updates so frequently, but I’m trying to make the extension the best it can be.

–Keyword Icons–

The new CyberSearch 0.9.9 has two main features that are accompanied by a handful of bug fixes. The first thing that we’ve added is a slightly intelligent system that will try to guess what icon to use when you’re creating a new keyword. Basically what it does is grab the first URL you specify in the “Website URL” field, attach “favicon.ico” onto the end, and then paste it into the Icon URL field:

To have the icon URL regenerated you can click the “auto” link at any time. We also wanted to show a preview of what the icon looks like, and CyberSearch now does that by replacing the “help” image located next to the URL field. If the field is blank you’ll still see the question mark icon, and you’ll still be able to get help for that field by hovering over the icon even after it’s been replaced.

–Smart Keywords–

I know that we all love the keyword system that CyberSearch offers, but sometimes it can be difficult to remember all of your keywords once you have more than a handful. That’s why we came up with what we like to call “smart” keywords.

How do they work? Well, there isn’t really anything that you have to setup in order to start using them (they are enabled for everyone by default). That’s why they are so great. Just type a URL, followed by a space, and then the text you want to search for. You will instantly see results from only that site:

cybersearch smart domain.png

We, however, wanted to minimize the amount of work you needed to do in order to take advantage of this feature. Thats why you can also just press the spacebar after a full URL in the address bar to immediately search the contents of the site you’re currently on. Here’s an example where I was viewing the Firefox add-ons homepage, and all I had to do was press the spacebar followed by the extension name I was looking for:

cybersearch full url keyword.png

Notice how all of the results are from the Mozilla add-ons site? Cool, huh? You don’t have to spend time setting up an extensive list of keywords that you’ll never remember, and yet you can still search your favorite sites!

Keywords take precedence over the domain searching, and so any keywords you have setup will override this functionality. If you want to disable the setting all together you can do so in the General tab, and then uncheck the Automatically search domains option.

–And More–

We also threw in a couple of more minor fixes in this release:

When configuring keywords CyberSearch will truncate long URL’s that may appear in the drop-down menu.
HTML characters that appeared in the titles of results (ampersands, quotes, etc…) should show up as expected.

We’d very much appreciate it if you can kick around the new release to see if there are any bugs. The smart keywords won’t work with sites that have some special characters in them, such as question marks, and the reason we did that was because Google doesn’t like searching those kind of sites. Other than that anything should be fair game.

If you get a spare second don’t forget to leave a review for our extension. We’re currently sitting at 4.00 out of 5 stars, and we wouldn’t mind seeing it go up a little more. 😉

Get CyberSearch Extension for Firefox

Hasta La Gadget!

CyberSearch 1.0.2: Pull Up Google Results Page Faster

CyberSearch Publicly Available on Mozilla Add-ons

Why the CyberSearch Extension has been Discontinued