This tumblelog is about Queriac, an online tool that allows you to manage your quicksearches, shortcuts, and bookmarklets by taking them out of your browser profile and onto the web, making them portable, taggable, shareable, and generally easier to manage. Drawing from the concept of
YubNub and extending it in the spirit of
del.icio.us, Queriac effectively turns your browser’s address bar into a flexible command line. To start using Queriac, head over to
http://queri.ac.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been quietly releasing a whole new world of command functionality, commands that have arguments and options. If you’re familiar with the unix command line then you probably understand what options do already. Arguments place values at differents points in a URL. A good example of this is the qshow command which takes you to a specific user command page. You simply need to specify a user and a user command’s keyword. For example:
- To go to my page and see my google command: qshow ghorner g
- To go to zeke’s post page: qshow zeke post
Options are similar to arguments but are well, optional. Let’s take for example our new google command with options. (You’ll need to update your command as explained in the last post to use the new google command).
- To search Google Books for thoreau: g -type books thoreau
- To search Google Products for mp3 players with 50 results per page:
g -type products -num 50 mp3 players
- Of course you can still do your basic google search for your name:
g your name
Note: We didn’t have to specify a search type here since options can have default values.
As you can see, options add more functionality to your commands if you want it. So what happens if you don’t like using -type to specify search type and get tired of typing the same long arguments for some of your options? Set up your own aliases!
For the previous commands with options, my aliases shorten them to:
- g -t b thoreau
- g -t p -n 50 mp3 players
As cool as options are, they get even cooler when we apply them to web forms. Want to do an advanced Google Mail search? Try the gmas command. Want to text somebody right from your address bar? Try the txt command. To read more on what is possible with options and arguments read this tutorial.
In case you haven’t noticed, there were some major changes released in the past months related to how we share commands. Back in the day when you saw a command you liked, you simply copied it and presto, you had your own unique copy. The problem with this was that as our command repository grew, it became cluttered with so many duplicate commands. Searching for new commands became a pain. But most important of all, there was no intelligent way of telling users about improvements in commands, commands that are broken, etc. So what we did to address this was create a master command (ie master google command) and let users create their own user command from it (ie your google user command).
Some basics about these entities:
- A command is controlled by its creator and/or an admin. It will have the latest working functionality and isn’t tied to any user (ie if a user disappears the command will stay)
- If you’ve created a command don’t worry about looking for a separate form to edit it. Updates to your user command are passed automatically to the command as well.
- Eventually commands will be more group-oriented so that any command user can suggest updates to a command and if considered an authority on the command update the command themself.
- A user command is your custom version of a command. You customize most aspects of your user command, what default options you want, name, description, etc. except for the public state of it and the url.
- The reason for the fixed url is that we don’t want user commands to be related to a command but have completely different functionality. As limiting as this may sound, another feature of commands (to be explained in the next post) opens up a whole world of custom functionality for your user commands. Of course you can always just create a new command based on your user command.
- When you copy (really subscribe to) a command or user command, you’re creating a user command of that command.
- Private commands don’t have any the benefits of being part of a command group. You’re on your own. In general we encourage users to be public in order to share what we know and learn about commands. If you’d like more privacy features, feel free to make a ticket and/or pipe up on the list.
- When a command is updated no updates are pushed out to user commands. Rather, your user command’s status is changed on its own page. Clicking on the provided update link will update your command to the latest.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend browsing commands and sorting them to your liking. You can search the commands with the form on that page or with the searchc command.
It’s the little things.. We’ve pushed out a small update that shows favicons next to each command based on the command’s domain, if it has one. Here’s a screenshot:
While Internet Explorer and Opera are not likely to be the preferrred browsers for the Queriac userbase, you never know. To see the new instructions, log in and visit the settings page.
These days, we’re working on making Queriac easier to set up and use. The latest effort in this regard is an OpenSearch installer for Firefox and Camino browsers. This means you can add Queriac to your browser’s Search Bar with with a single button-click. Here’s what it looks like installed on Firefox 3 for Mac..
To install the search plugin, log in and visit the settings page. Easy!
Ever wanted to create a command based on an existing one, and found it annoying to copy all the details of the existing command over to the new one? Well, friend, today marks the end of such annoyances. All the command pages now have a ‘Duplicate’ command option. Think of it as a “Save as..” feature.
Do you have a command with queries exposed to the public, and sometimes wish you could run a private query or two through it, without having to edit the command? Examples of such queries might be things like “why do i suck so bad?”, or “how to quietly overthrow the patriarchy”, or the classic “i like big butts and i cannot lie”…
If so, the simple new stealth query is for you! Just prepend an exclamation point (!) when running any command and Queriac will quietly execute your command, without saving the query.
Examples of stealth Google searches (notice the space following the exclamation point is optional):
! g ron paul is cool
!g i listen to the counting crows
Yay discretion!
* Private commands are no longer showing up on /user/commands/tag/xyz pages. Phew!
* Tags with strange characters are no longer breaking the URLs (namely periods)
* Tag cloud has been improved
* Multiple tags can now be specified when searching for commands. e.g. /user/commands/tag/xyx+123+foo
GET parameters can now be passed to Queriac’s create a new command page to auto-populate the form’s fields. The allowed parameters are: name, keyword, url, description, and tags.
Using this new feature I was able to create a new bookmarklet (tentatively keyworded ‘spawn’) that works much like my delicious posting bookmarklet. It grabs the current page’s title, URL, and any text you’ve selected and passes it to the ‘new command’ page! Here’s a use case:
- You visit yahoo.com and perform a search.
- You get to the results page and think “Hmm.. I should create a Queriac quicksearch for Yahoo.”
- In your address bar you type, j spawn y, assuming j is your local bookmarklet enabler’s keyword, and y is what you want your new command’s keyword to be.
- You’re directed to Queriac, with the new command page largely filled out for you. Tweak the URL as needed, tag it, and you’re done.
- Bask in the niftyness.
That’s all folks!
