Sam Spade search plugin

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I use Firefox, and I like the little search box thingie in the upper left. I decided it might be fun to figure out how it works by making a search plugin for the website SamSpade.org. Sam Spade looks up whois data and other interesting things about websites, and I find myself using it from time to time.

If you’d like to get the Sam Spade plugin for Firefox, visit this page. After installing it, you’ll have a new search type in the popup menu in the upper right. Look, ma, no restart!

If for some reason, you don’t like it, you’ll need to remove it by hand. It turns out that while there is a handy-dandy way to auto-install it, there is no user interface to uninstall it. Instead, you have to stop Firefox, then go into the c:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxsearchplugins directory and remove the samspade.src and samspade.png files. The instructions for how to remove a search plugin are very hard to find on the net, so hopefully this blog entry will be found by someone who wants to know how to uninstall a Firefox or Mozilla search box plugin.

Sorry for that big paragraph… as you might have guessed by now, it was intended as search engine fodder!

It turns out that Firefox (and all the Mozilla-based browsers) is using the same language for these search plugins that Apple’s Sherlock tool uses, so Sherlock users might also be able to us this plugin to get it to talk to Sam Spade. I have not tested it on a Mac, YMMV.


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