Post by mjc on Jan 31, 2010 21:19:31 GMT -5
I've spent some time over the past couple of days playing around with making some search plugins for FF. Supposedly, IE also adheres to the OpenSearch standard, so these should work in IE, too...but since I don't use Windows, I can't check them out (IE7 and higher, only, I think...).
If you are familiar with how the FF search plugins work then bear with me...but basically, the FF search plugin is a means of easily changing your search engine and you can have plugins to search very specific sites/databases. This also changes the right click "Search
?? for" when you highlight a term on a page. You change the search engine by clicking on the icon in the search box, that will open a drop down list of the installed search plugins. Choose the one you want. Then you can highlight a term, right click and search...
The plugins I have so far are, USDA PLANTS database (scientific name, default) PFAF and Cornell's Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners...if anyone can think of other places that offer searchable databases, add them here. They can't require a login in order to be able to search the database. I'd also prefer that if the search or results are in more than one language that it obvious how to set the language or I'll default the language of the search/results to English
There is also a Internet Archive:Texts plugin available on the Mozilla site...that is in relation to the post I put up about the old books, in another thread. There is also a Wikipedia plugin already.
I'm working on one for the Biodiversity Heritage Library that was also in that thread.
If you are familiar with how the FF search plugins work then bear with me...but basically, the FF search plugin is a means of easily changing your search engine and you can have plugins to search very specific sites/databases. This also changes the right click "Search
?? for" when you highlight a term on a page. You change the search engine by clicking on the icon in the search box, that will open a drop down list of the installed search plugins. Choose the one you want. Then you can highlight a term, right click and search...The plugins I have so far are, USDA PLANTS database (scientific name, default) PFAF and Cornell's Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners...if anyone can think of other places that offer searchable databases, add them here. They can't require a login in order to be able to search the database. I'd also prefer that if the search or results are in more than one language that it obvious how to set the language or I'll default the language of the search/results to English
There is also a Internet Archive:Texts plugin available on the Mozilla site...that is in relation to the post I put up about the old books, in another thread. There is also a Wikipedia plugin already.
I'm working on one for the Biodiversity Heritage Library that was also in that thread.
Let me know if I can test something or help out in some way.
