Users should be able to add websites as search engines if they support the OpenSearch standard. This would allow users to add custom search engines, which is helpful now that many search engines have been removed from settings.
This feature is already supported by Brave Core (desktop).
For example, GitHub supports OpenSearch. Every page on GitHub has a <link rel="search" tag in the <head> of its HTML:
<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/opensearch.xml" title="GitHub">
The linked XML file (https://github.com/opensearch.xml) contains the URL format for search terms:
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>GitHub</ShortName>
<Description>Search GitHub</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">https://github.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="https://github.com/search?q={searchTerms}&ref=opensearch"/>
<moz:SearchForm>https://github.com/search</moz:SearchForm>
</OpenSearchDescription>
cndouglas
All 13 comments
James, we'll need some UI here
anthonypkeane
on 13 Mar 2019
Here's an OpenSearch parser class from the Firefox Focus iOS app:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios/blob/master/Blockzilla/OpenSearchParser.swift
Edit: The actual upstream source is https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/blob/master/Client/Frontend/Browser/OpenSearch.swift, and @danishjafri88 points out that it is already included in https://github.com/brave/brave-ios/blob/development/Client/Frontend/Browser/Search/OpenSearch.swift
cndouglas
on 13 Mar 2019
@Liunkae The parser class is in brave-ios too. Thanks for the help anyways!!
danishjafri88
on 13 Mar 2019
UI will be inherited from FF, see https://github.com/brave/brave-ios/issues/586 for some more internal information.
jhreis
on 18 Mar 2019
@jhreis of #582 & #495 only #582 has UI which I have incorporated. #495 Only lets you edit(reorder/delete) the table datasource. There is no UI to add a custom engine like FF.
danishjafri88
on 18 Mar 2019
It's a good manner to put at least some kind of workaround to the thread. Many features are supported indirectly through other extension/options etc.
The DuckDucksGo "!bang"-search can do this already, so kind of can brave. If we set/use duckduckgo as a search engine, than typing "!gi nike" will bring me google image search of nikes.
If I type "!gh kodi" I'll find myself right on the github search result page for that.
Maybe people (new other users) could be made aware of this and use this in the meantime. Through the documentation and marketing/website e.g.
(of course just clicking a custom search engine icon for mostly used engines is more productive 馃 )
maxgrass
on 7 Aug 2019
Good info @maxgrass. I think part of this is to allow people to add Reddit, Amazon, Ebay, whatever else as a search engine. Power-user commands like you list are definitely useful too!
jhreis
on 8 Aug 2019
What's the time-frame for getting this done? Could you please (pretty please) revert the removal of previously available search engines if this ui isn't done and about to ship?
pde
on 10 Aug 2019
And @maxgrass that tip is creative though unfortunately it takes five accurate taps on ios to type something like "!w ", plus the extra latency of dns, tcp, and tls handshakes to ddg, which is a lot on slow networks. So the ux remains far worse than brave previously provided.
pde
on 10 Aug 2019
+1 from https://twitter.com/samlustgarten/status/1282215397832327170 - whether it was OpenSearch or just being able to manually add a search engine
bsclifton
on 13 Jul 2020
Would love to see this, too!
szaimen
on 17 Aug 2020
Any updates?
orkunkl
on 17 Sep 2020
Any updates? It is my favorite possible feature
isaacjara17
on 4 Nov 2020
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Most helpful comment
Any updates? It is my favorite possible feature