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June 5, 2007

Persistent Queries

Google is a great search engine, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try other search engines if you can't find what you're looking for. I know, it's hard to copy the query, go to another site and paste it in the search box.

Try this search on is one of the best Greasemonkey scripts I've ever installed: it's smart enough to detect you're on a search results page (and not only for Google and other big search engines) and shows a small bar at the bottom of the page that includes links to other search engines: Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask and others. This way your query is persistent across most search engines and it's much easier to do research on a topic.

If you don't like the list of available search engines, just edit the code and add other sites. You can also set the value of the checkRef variable to true to show the bar on pages referred from search engines as well.

8 comments:

  1. that's cool, but do you ever really need another search engine than Google?

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  2. All I want to know, is why is there a picture of yahoo on a pro google site? google and yahoo hate each other...

    and why would you ever use yahoo if you couldnt find something on google? yahoo's search algorithms are based of googles algorithms...

    personally, i can always find what im looking for using google, but if i cant, i use windows live search.

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  3. @Nick:
    IGoogle makes use of yahoo open source software... I was originally shocked too, but after I saw how great their code was I never made a point of it...

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  4. << All I want to know, is why is there a picture of yahoo on a pro google site? google and yahoo hate each other... >>

    This is not a pro-Google site, it's a site mostly about Google. I admire Google, but I'm not a fan; that's why I go to their competitors if I feel like it. You should judge a site/app based on its quality, not based on the name of the company that produced it.

    << and why would you ever use yahoo if you couldnt find something on google? yahoo's search algorithms are based of googles algorithms >>

    Yahoo uses different algorithms and sometimes they have better results than Google (look at the top results for [google food] at Yahoo and Google).

    My personal rank would be:
    1. Google
    2. Yahoo
    3. Ask.com
    4. Windows Live Search
    5. Hakia.com

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  5. You can get the same feature by installing the "Customize Google" Firefox add-on.

    I think this is much more robust than the Greasemonkey script.

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  6. Mark, you didn't read the title of the post: "PERSISTENT queries".

    Customize Google only shows the links on Google pages. This script lets you move from one search engine to another one easily and, even if it's not perfect, I think the concept is brilliant.

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  7. this is an interesting idea, and i think it could be really useful! Im not sure how many people out there are pro/anti M$ out there, but in my experience: in the same way there is mac, ubuntu and other operating systems, there should be some good competition among the search engines. Google is awesome, but it would not be so valuable if it was the only search engine. its good to have choices. thanks for the post.

    -C

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  8. So who came up with the idea to have blue title links, black descriptions or content and green URLs?

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