Search engines: Time to take a stand

izk666

Looking at the title, I thought you had enabled the POST search option like in old Opera (an extra text box to include the POST data).

But as I can see there is no news
Will it soon be available?

Pesala

@izk666 Take a look in Settings, Search. The POST option is already available.

QuHno

@pesala There are two problems:

Not all engines support POST (trivial, if they don't support it you are out of luck)
Vivaldi does not show "Add as search engine" when right clicking into the search field of most exclusively POST capable engines.

The latter can be overcome with a bookmarklet:
https://quhno.vivaldi.net/2017/10/20/how-to-add-search-engines-that-use-post-to-vivaldi/

JoelYoung

I've just spent a few minutes searching (in DDG), but can't find out what searching with POST means. Can someone explain it? What is the advantage?

Ornorm

@joelyoung I think you can get the answer by reading what's in the link provided in Pesala's answer.

Some search engines allow users to use the POST method for search. This method ensures that websites won’t know the search terms you use to find their site and the search isn’t logged on web servers or stored in History. If you have enabled “Use POST method”, but search doesn’t come up with any results, this means that the search engine of your choice doesn’t support the POST method. If you still want to use this search engine, you should disable “Use POST method”.

Vladimyr

if it is so important, why don't show the icon of selected searh engine in the search field? it would make the choice more evident.
this feature was requested almost a year ago, and has not added yet. is it so difficult to implement?
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/25249/show-selected-search-engine-icon-in-the-search-field

luetage

@vladimyr Personally I don't want an ugly site icon permanently in my UI – should be optional.

Pesala

@vladimyr The icons should be displayed in the Search with menu too.

As with the bookmarks, there should be an option to show the icon and/or text, or both.

satshow

I use normal google but I go try Qwant for a while.

LakeInHolland

This is definitely a discussion I intend to follow - I have a feeling it may run for some time! My own problem is that whenever I try a different search engine instead of Google I get fewer, and less useful, hits, though this is usually when I'm looking for examples of a term or expression in use 'in the wild' in order to determine if a translation (of a term or expression) that I've come up with is a term or expression actually used by real people writing in the UK. (Fascinating to know the French for search engine is moteur de recherche; perfectly logical, though, and sometimes one rather envies the French with their almost divine Académie. By and large, though, I still favour natural selection!) Having said all that, I'll now try using other search engines. I do already use Ecosia sometimes.

dominicw2

I alternate between DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Ecosia. I tend to use DuckDuckGo the most because I like their UI and dark mode, and I find the programming Instant Answers really useful. I've found Qwant to be particularly good if I'm looking for something in French or German, which is not very often, but once, when I was researching someone in Germany, Qwant found something crucial that no other search engine had. I like the fact that Ecosia plants trees so I use it sometimes too, but I don't like it as much as a search engine.

josephj11

@luetage That's almost the only reason I ever use Google (and based on this, I'll switch to startpage.) When looking up software issues, I often get solutions that are way too old to be useful and restricting the results to the last year really helps.

josephj11

@greybeard One search engine that gets virtually no press is SymbolHound. It allows search terms containing syntactical tokens like braces. Since a lot of Vivaldi users know how to program, they might find it useful.

josephj11

@lakeinholland Another great French word is the one for "computer". It's ordinateur which conveys the sense of putting things in order which I like a lot better than something that's just a number cruncher.

greybeard

@josephj11 Hmm, might try it out but not even HTTPS.

fred8615

I use Bing exclusively. Though only because of the Microsoft Rewards program.

frommhold

@lakeinholland You'd like https://www.linguee.com then. This gives you translations in all major european languages from "real use" examples, i.e. it shows the searched-for term in multiple text snippets. I tend to use it a lot.

ukanuk

So Vivaldi has affiliate partnerships with Bing, and others. Does this mean using the prefilled "https://www.bing.com/search?FORM=INCOH2&PC=IFJ1&PTAG=ICO-c9d0fc87&q=%s" supports Vivaldi, but when I changed it to "https://www.bing.com/search?q=%s" then it would stop supporting Vivaldi?

Ayespy

@ukanuk Yes. Exactly. The first link tells Bing the visitor was using Vivaldi's sponsored link.

luetage

@ukanuk That's the reason why other browsers don't allow you to edit preexisting engines, especially on mobile.