Inquisitor - Enhance Safari’s Search

Inquisitor 3 is a powerful plugin for Safari that enhances your search experience when using Safari’s built in search field. The plugin auto-completes your partially typed words and phrases, returns relevant search suggestions, offers you the three top Google results for one click access, and even saves your search history so that, with time, your results become customized and more relevant. Moreover, it’s hard to deny that the plugin’s appearance is really pretty.

But best of all, Inquisitor allows you to add custom searches to Safari’s Google search box. By default, Inquisitor includes Flickr and Amazon, but it also comes stocked with a dropdown list of popular search engines and allows you to add them with a couple of clicks. After installing the plugin, go into Safari’s preferences and select the tab ‘Search’ with the inquisitor icon. Now click on the ‘Edit Sites…’ button and choose the search engine you want from the list. If you want to add a search engine that isn’t already defined, that’s easy too. A favorite of mine that really rocks is SkreemR, which returns playable and downloadable mp3 results. Here’s how to add it.

First go to Screemr.com and search for something. Have a look at the resulting URL. Here’s the URL returned from a search for ‘Famous Blue Raincoat‘:

Find your search terms in the URL and replace them with %@. For most engines, you can delete everything that comes after the search terms. Here’s what you’ll end up with:

Hit the ‘+’ button and add this URL to the proper field in your custom search box. Now you can search for mp3s from Safari’s search box!

As an added bonus Inquisitor lets you add custom keyboard shortcuts to all of your favorite search engines and displays them inside the results box. This is great as you don’t have to remember the shortcuts yourself.

I highly recommend Inquisitor 3 for the power and functionality it adds to Safari’s built in Google search box.

Inquisitor 3 is available from David Watanabe. It is freeware.