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Routing searches through Dowser

I've been experimenting with Dowser, a cool little python script that lets you conduct searches on Google, Teoma, Wikipedia and more from a local "web page" (screenshots). It looks like you can add your own search engines, too, although I haven't tried that yet. The beauty part is that Dowser watches what you do and builds a cache and an alphabetical index based on what you've been searching for. It's pretty nifty and potentially quite useful.

I mention it here because fans of our pet search utilities like Sogudi or Quicksilver's built-in site searching can easily re-route a few of their favorite searches through Dowser. You just need to change the strings you've recorded in your setup for either app.

Once you have Dowser installed and running on your Mac, try changing Sogudi 's Google string to "http://127.0.0.1:5309/search?q=@@@&s=google". Now all your searches "feed" Dowser cache-building info that you can use downstream.

Any other good Dowser hacks out there?

Phil Ulrich's picture

Actually, it doesn't let you...

Actually, it doesn't let you add other searches at all. It simply lets you add URLs that are then used with google's site: parameter. Actually adding searches would require some manipulation of Dowser.app/Contents/Resources/util.py.

To search Dowser in Quicksilver, bookmark this

And lastly, though I hate to be a killjoy: I should note that the way that Dowser searches Google technically violates many of Google's terms of use (I once found this, and it's referred to in Google Hacks, but now I can only find it under the Google Labs terms). Pulling data directly from Google searches, stripping the HTML, and redirecting it goes against how they want their results to be used. Dowser should probably be using the Google API.

 
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