Motivation

Similar to "bangs" on duckduckgo and brave search but customizable and a little faster.

Setup

Clone the project. You can do this with git clone $project_git_url. Make the config file. In your favorite web browser, set up searchserver as a search engine. Then, build and run searchserver.

Config file

Make a file called .searchserver in your home directory. You can do this by running touch .searchserver from your home directory. It is treated as a YAML file. An example config file is:

port: 3000
patterns:
# hoogle      
    - - h (.*)
      - https://hoogle.haskell.org/?hoogle=\1

# default search engine
    - - (.*)
      - https://search.brave.com/search?q=foo # brave search
      # - https://www.google.com/search?q=\1  # google
      # - https://www.bing.com/search?q=\1    # bing
      # - https://yandex.com/search/?text=\1  # yandex
      # - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=\1        # duckduckgo

With this configuration, you can put "h" before a search query to search it on hoogle. Otherwise, the query will be searched on duckduckgo.

port is the port that searchserver runs from. patterns is a list of search-replace pairs. Each one is a list with the first entry being a perl-style regular expression, and the second one being a URL template string in which captured entries can be substituted, with "\1" being the first substituted term, "\2" the second, and so forth. The first regex in the list that matches the query is used to substitue the query into the corresponding URL template string. The query is stripped of leading and trailing whitespace and the regular expression is surrounded by "^" and "$" to ensure that it must fit the entire query.

Browser configuration

In Microsoft Edge, go to Privacy, Search and Services > Address Bar and Search > Manage Search Engines, and add a new search engine with URL string "http://localhost:3000/?q=%s". In Firefox, install the "Add custom search engine" extension, then add a search engine with URL string "http://localhost:3000/?q=%s"