351265 - search with multiple engines at once

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Martin Meyer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060901 Firefox/2.0b2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060901 Firefox/2.0b2

I was just showing off FF2b2 to my best friend and he made an interesting suggestion that I thought I'd pass along.  He was wondering if it might be possible to select more than one search engine from the search bar and have the results from each one open in different tabs.

I could see this implemented in one really useful way:
A window that can pop up on a certain key press (or by clicking something with the mouse I suppose...) that has a search box (with default focus) and a list of search engines below with check boxes next to each.  Type in your query, tab through with the keyboard to select the engines you want, then press enter (click ok).  New tabs open with all the relevant searches.

Would something like this maybe be possible for either FF2 or FF3?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

This is likely a wontfix. There are search engines that aggregate results from many popular engines. it is likely that one or more have a search plugin available at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

The UI you describe is quite complex and sounds like a good candidate for an extension.

Comment 3

[Dany]

Your comment is true, but in my case we widely use Firefox on a big Intranet (40 000 users), and this feature would be useful when you have different specific search engines of different applications, some of them without the possibility to be indexed by a search engine.

Moreover, this feature would allow to limit the search engines you want the results for, eg only wikipedia + another specific site, for instance, therefore without the use of a search engine.

Comment 4

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

Alex, closing as wontfix?

Comment 5

[Mycroft Project (CC)]

I get loads of requests for this and while aggregators do address part of the problem there are plenty of other situations where multiple engine searching would be useful - myself I frequently search for the same term using the public and admin interfaces at the same time and qould be very happy if I could open both at the same time.

If it's 'CANTFIX' or INVALID->extension fair enough but WONTFIX seems to imply it's not a good idea?

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

WONTFIX means it won't be fixed in Firefox itself. That it won't be fixed in Firefox doesn't make it a useless idea :)

No plans to do this right now, but it might be a good addon experiment.

Comment 8

[macster_smart]

That's a shame that this feature will not be implemented into Firefox. It would have been very useful to myself and many others, because instead of searching for the same thing on 10-20 different sites like I do now all that could have been done with a single search on the search bar.

I'm looking forward maybe other browsers will implement this idea, then it's time to change the browser I'm using right now.

Comment 9

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+2]]

You should check the available extensions on AMO. I believe that there will be an extension which implements what you are searching for.

Comment 10

[u88484]

Found both of these in about 15 seconds and they both seem to do what you are looking for.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1271
* Search multiple sites at the same time
* Has parallel (searches open in tabs) and single search (list of search engines in sidebar) types
* Manage search engines and categories from a single interface
* Add and Edit categories
* Organise search plugins via categories 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4843
Multiple searches with middle or right clicks on search engines.