MacMembraneThere are peels everywhere…

The only thing I miss about Safari 3 was its compatibility with Inquisitor. Inquisitor is a web search tool that lets you add custom, keyboard accessible searches to Safari’s Google Search Box. (I’ve written about Inquisitor in the past.) Safari 4 Beta has changed the way input managers talk with the browser, and for all the beauty and utility of Inquisitor, the addon is essentially a hack. No fault of Apple’s for breaking hacks in major upgrades to their software.

Safari 4, however, has added some of its own functionality to the Google Search Box by way of ‘as you type’ search suggestions that, if selected, will bring up a Google search page with the selected results. About the new functionality, Daring Fireball writes:

The Google search field now populates the suggestion menu as you type with results from Google’s Suggest feature. For me at least, the suggestions are remarkably, almost spookily, good.

I agree with Gruber that the search suggestions are a significant new feature. But the fact remains that Inquisitor, which, again, let you search user defined engines without detouring through Google, is dead and gone. I’ve been grieving its loss.

Until today, that is. The idea struck me that TextExpander from Smile on My Mac can be rigged to let you search custom search engines from Safari’s location field, rather than the Google Search Box.

What’s TextExpander?

TextExpander is a typing assistant which lets you expand custom text abbreviations into longer, often used text snippets. For instance, if you find yourself replying a lot of emails in the same way, type your reply once in TextExpander and assign it an abbreviation. The next time you need to write that same email again, just type the abbreviation and TextExpander will expand it out for you. The powerful little preference pane will significantly reduce what Merlin Mann refers to as “idiotic typing time.” It’s 29.95 USD.

Using TextExpander to Perform Custom Web Searches

Each time you search a site a unique URL is generated which relates to your search terms. For instance, if you want to search Twitter, go to http://search.twitter.com/ and enter your search terms. I’ll use Mac Mini for my example. A search for Mac Mini will generate the URL http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mac+mini. It’s fairly easy to see how to perform a custom search from the Location bar by looking at this URL – just enter search.twitter.com/search?q= and then type your search terms. But as easy as it might be to understand how to search specific sites from the Location Bar, actually doing so requires an amount of manual labor (i.e., typing) that I’m not willing to complete. Here is where TextExpander comes in.

Go to a site that you often search and search for something. Have a look at the resulting URL. I’ll do a search on Flickr for “snow leopard.”

Next, highlight only the base URL and the search syntax up to your search terms as shown in the above screen shot (in my testing with various sites, everything after your search terms in the URL isn’t necessary to perform the location bar search Update: It is possible set up searches for URLs that have important search parameters after the search terms by using TextExpander’s “Position Cursor Here” command. Please see my response to Patrick in the comments for more details). Now go into TextExpander’s menu bar item and select “Create Snippet From Selection.”

TextExpander’s preference pane will open and from here you can add your snippet title and the abbreviation you want to use to expand it. For Flickr I’m using ’ssf’ (my choice here is motivated by the need to remember a few different search snippets: Google images will be ’ssgi,’ Delicious, ’ssd,’ etcetera). Have a look at the screenshot:

Your new Custom search is now set up and ready to use.

Using Your Custom Searches

The hard part is setting your new custom searches up (and that’s not too hard); the easy part is using them. Open up Safari and select the Location field (Command + L by default). Now type your abbreviation (’ssf’ if you’re following my Flickr example). After TextExpander expands your search URL, simply type your search terms and hit enter. If everything goes to plan, Safari will do the rest of the work (adding %20 between your search terms if your search is multiple words) and open up your results.

Here’s a video of the entire process from Snippet creating to performing your custom searches.

One of the best parts of using TextExpander to perform your custom searches is that you can have your cake and eat it too – that is, you don’t have to give up Safari’s new search term completion in the Google Search Box to perform your custom searches. Moreover, because TextExpander is a stand alone application and not a Safari hack, it should be more future proof and won’t break with the next release of Safari.