Is it possible to customise the search engine buttons in GNOME Shell?

Gnome-Shell search providers are described by XML files in the folder /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers

You will notice two XML files - google.xml and wikipedia.xml

Lets create a new search provider - copy the google.xml file as a template

11.10

sudo cp /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/google.xml /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml

12.04

sudo cp /usr/share/gnome-shell/open-search-providers/google.xml /usr/share/gnome-shell/open-search-providers/duckduckgo.xml

Now lets open the file and change some details to search with duckduckgo:

11.10

sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml

12.04

sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/open-search-providers/duckduckgo.xml

Change the following XML tags:

<ShortName>DuckDuckGo</ShortName>
<Description>DuckDuckGo Search</Description>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}"/>

The only difficult part is finding out how a search engine searches - in duckduckgo I searched for something - you see in the title bar how the search provider adds its search terms

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final result

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In order to see the changes, you need to restart GNOME Shell by pressing Alt+F2, typing "r" and pressing enter.


Linked Questions:

  1. Is it possible to re-arrange the search providers on the GNOME Shell Activities Overview display?