308122 - Use official Answers.com search plugin

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 309379

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC & forums)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050911 Firefox/1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050911 Firefox/1.4

The Dictionary.com search plugin has recently been replaced with an Answers.com
search plugin Ben Goodger wrote (bug 289362), but I've just noticed there's an
official search plugin written by Answers.com:

http://www.answers.com/main/firefox_plugins.jsp
http://download1.answers.com/pub/moztoolbar/answers.src
http://download1.answers.com/pub/moztoolbar/answers.png

I've also just noticed that there is yet another one on Mycroft, written by Roy
Chang:

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=Answers.com&submitform=Find+search+plugins
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/answers.src
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/plugins/answers.png

Why not use either of them?

They also don't require the changes that "were required to the Internet Search
Service to support answer's query format", and have a correct PNG image (bug
306075).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

While that would have been reasonable before, now we have the changes. I
wouldn't be surprised if the answers.com folks wanted a big long URL full of
tracking vars (thus cc:rebron, since I think that's his department), but for our
purposes Ben's is better:

Ben's: http://www.answers.com/mozilla
Official: http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=mozilla&method=2&gwp=13
Google:
http://www.google.com/search?hs=xFB&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22client%3Dfirefox%22&btnG=Search

Which would you rather paste into an email or a blog post? (And the number of
times I've seen &client=firefox-a links in blog posts say those tracking URLs
are pretty useless.)

Comment 2

[Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC & forums)]

The Google URL is definitely terribly long (is someone considering taking some
of the stuff out?), but neither Answers.com URL is too long, and I would
consider using the official one just because it is the official one.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Forward-duping to the official bug to officially use the official URL.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 309379 ***