Search from the desktop

[sheich0608]

Hi all,

Wondering if there is a tool for PowerPC Macs that extends the functionality of Spotlight to query custom search engines/databases. On my MacBook Pro with Catalina, I use Haste (a standalone program, but I think for 10.11+), but was wondering if anyone knows of a way to search directly from the desktop in Tiger or Leopard. Thought maybe using Spotlight APIs would be the most obvious method, but if there's another program that does it, would love to use it.

Thank you!

-sheich0608

 

[eyoungren]

I believe there is a Dashboard websearch widget you can use for that. If you put Dashboard into developer mode you can drag it on to the desktop. From there a search will trigger your browser to open (if it isn't already) and then the search gets performed.

I used to have a modified search widget like that on my desktop (from Dashboard). I just never used it.

 

[sheich0608]

I believe there is a Dashboard websearch widget you can use for that. If you put Dashboard into developer mode you can drag it on to the desktop. From there a search will trigger your browser to open (if it isn't already) and then the search gets performed.

I used to have a modified search widget like that on my desktop (from Dashboard). I just never used it.

Thank you, I'll give that a try!

 

[Project Alice]

I'm confused by this question.. Tiger and Leopard have the spotlight menu directly at the top right, which IMO actually works way better than the sloppy popup window in "modern macOS". It will search anywhere on the mac.. If you're just trying to search ~/Desktop, open that in a Finder window and search using that parameter.

 

[AphoticD]

I used to use Quicksilver by Black Tree religiously and swear it had a web search feature. It is like Spotlight, but far more flexible.

Quicksilver macOS at your Fingertips

Quicksilver is a fast and free productivity application for the Mac, allowing you to save time and improve your efficiency. Quicksilver is available for Lion, Snow Leopard and more.

qsapp.com

I've just installed this on my PowerBook G4 17" to have a play (it has been many years). The last version to support Tiger and Leopard on PowerPC was ß54. After digging through the Wayback Machine, I've downloaded the oldest version of the Web Search plugin I could find (v222) which appears to require ß60 or later (Mac OS X 10.6+).

I was able to find a very old plugin page listing Web Search Plugin v104 which may have worked, but the internet archive doesn't have the file: https://web.archive.org/web/20101210082004/http://qsapp.com/plugins/

So it looks like we can rule out QS doing desktop-level web searches from Tiger or Leopard.

I have installed v1.5.9 on my 2008 MacBook running El Capitan. It works really well on newer systems and will do the job for 10.6 or later but unfortunately not a solution for the OP.

-----

Web Search shown here in the screenshot for later systems. And although Web Search doesn't work on PowerPC, Quicksilver is really useful for a hundred other features and many of the plugins found on the repository via archive.org will still work on the PowerPC version.

 

[sheich0608]

I'm confused by this question.. Tiger and Leopard have the spotlight menu directly at the top right, which IMO actually works way better than the sloppy popup window in "modern macOS". It will search anywhere on the mac.. If you're just trying to search ~/Desktop, open that in a Finder window and search using that parameter.

Yes, Spotlight in Tiger and Leopard are very good at searching local files, but I would like to find a way to do custom web searches straight from the desktop (DuckDuckGo, Library catalogs, etc.). In modern macOS, there is a program called Flashlight which can extend the functionality of Spotlight to do just that, but I don’t believe it’s compatible with PowerPC.
[automerge]1582960781[/automerge]

I used to use Quicksilver by Black Tree religiously and swear it had a web search feature. It is like Spotlight, but far more flexible.

Quicksilver macOS at your Fingertips

Quicksilver is a fast and free productivity application for the Mac, allowing you to save time and improve your efficiency. Quicksilver is available for Lion, Snow Leopard and more.

qsapp.com

I've just installed this on my PowerBook G4 17" to have a play (it has been many years). The last version to support Tiger and Leopard on PowerPC was ß54. After digging through the Wayback Machine, I've downloaded the oldest version of the Web Search plugin I could find (v222) which appears to require ß60 or later (Mac OS X 10.6+).

I was able to find a very old plugin page listing Web Search Plugin v104 which may have worked, but the internet archive doesn't have the file: https://web.archive.org/web/20101210082004/http://qsapp.com/plugins/

So it looks like we can rule out QS doing desktop-level web searches from Tiger or Leopard.

I have installed v1.5.9 on my 2008 MacBook running El Capitan. It works really well on newer systems and will do the job for 10.6 or later but unfortunately not a solution for the OP.

-----
View attachment 896669
Web Search shown here in the screenshot for later systems. And although Web Search doesn't work on PowerPC, Quicksilver is really useful for a hundred other features and many of the plugins found on the repository via archive.org will still work on the PowerPC version.

Thank you for your research! This is very similar to what I do using Haste. I’ll do some more digging as well. I remember that there were Spotlight Plugins that you used to be able to download from Apple (on Wayback, last page update 2011). Would it be terribly complicated to write another one of these? Or, would Automator allow me to do this?

 

[AphoticD]

I had some time today and thought I'd like to try getting further with this one. So I set out to build Quicksilver ß60 from source for PowerPC as I read that it was technically the last version to support Leopard, but never released as a PowerPC/Universal binary (Officially Intel only)

Source for QS ß60 is available at: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/releases?after=B61

After much trial and error, I had a working build via Xcode 3.2.6 on 10.6.8 (with all targets set to SDK 10.5, ppc and GCC 4.2). I then expected the Web Search plugin I found earlier would just work. However, this was not the case. Digging deeper, the v221 plugin was i386 only, with no ppc code.

I then tracked down source code for the QS Web Search Plugin v21B, which was from the same era as the QS ß60 release (June 2011) at: https://github.com/quicksilver/elem...tree/da623efe786f3b072a8031ed55aada94007f2631

The plugin successfully built okay with all the frameworks re-linked, SDK set to 10.5, GCC 4.2 and ppc arch target.

I now have this installed on my PBG4 under Leopard and confirm the "Find With... [search engine]" works as expected.

The only quirk was I had to manually install the search engine catalog into `~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/` as the API lookup required HTTPS and Leopard has out of date TLS/SSL system certs which are not compatible. So I pulled the catalog using the same build running on 10.6 under Rosetta.

Attached is:
• Quicksilver-b60-PowerPC.zip (1.7MB) for Leopard only
• QS-WebSearchPlugin-21B-PowerPC.zip (24KB)
• QSPresetDocWebSearchesCache.zip (24KB)

The attached catalog cache files are to be installed at `~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/` and can be modified with a text editor as they are standard plist/xml files. Be sure to quit Quicksilver before installing or working on the cache files otherwise they will probably be overwritten.

It is very easy to add/remove and replace search engines in the catalog/index files. On my own Mac, I changed the outdated format eBay (US) searches for eBay (AU) along with a new search url format ( qss-https://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_nkw=*** ) and it works great!

The only downside is this older version of the plugin doesn't have the "Show Results For..." function, so there are no previews of search results, but rather a quick method for firing off a search to the browser.

 

[sheich0608]

I had some time today and thought I'd like to try getting further with this one. So I set out to build Quicksilver ß60 from source for PowerPC as I read that it was technically the last version to support Leopard, but never released as a PowerPC/Universal binary (Officially Intel only)

Source for QS ß60 is available at: https://github.com/quicksilver/Quicksilver/releases?after=B61

After much trial and error, I had a working build via Xcode 3.2.6 on 10.6.8 (with all targets set to SDK 10.5, ppc and GCC 4.2). I then expected the Web Search plugin I found earlier would just work. However, this was not the case. Digging deeper, the v221 plugin was i386 only, with no ppc code.

I then tracked down source code for the QS Web Search Plugin v21B, which was from the same era as the QS ß60 release (June 2011) at: https://github.com/quicksilver/elem...tree/da623efe786f3b072a8031ed55aada94007f2631

The plugin successfully built okay with all the frameworks re-linked, SDK set to 10.5, GCC 4.2 and ppc arch target.

I now have this installed on my PBG4 under Leopard and confirm the "Find With... [search engine]" works as expected.

The only quirk was I had to manually install the search engine catalog into `~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/` as the API lookup required HTTPS and Leopard has out of date TLS/SSL system certs which are not compatible. So I pulled the catalog using the same build running on 10.6 under Rosetta.

Attached is:
• Quicksilver-b60-PowerPC.zip (1.7MB) for Leopard only
• QS-WebSearchPlugin-21B-PowerPC.zip (24KB)
• QSPresetDocWebSearchesCache.zip (24KB)

The attached catalog cache files are to be installed at `~/Library/Caches/Quicksilver/Indexes/` and can be modified with a text editor as they are standard plist/xml files. Be sure to quit Quicksilver before installing or working on the cache files otherwise they will probably be overwritten.

It is very easy to add/remove and replace search engines in the catalog/index files. On my own Mac, I changed the outdated format eBay (US) searches for eBay (AU) along with a new search url format ( qss-https://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_nkw=*** ) and it works great!

The only downside is this older version of the plugin doesn't have the "Show Results For..." function, so there are no previews of search results, but rather a quick method for firing off a search to the browser.

View attachment 896752

Wow! This is fantastic, thank you so much! I'll have to test it with Leopard, but I'm a bit partial to Tiger for its speed; would it be possible to set the target SDK to 10.4?

Thank you again!