Allow custom search engines to (1) NOT %-encode queries (2) Use POST (3) use autofill
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• The problem: [ol] [li] Go to settings and make a custom search engine. e.g. archive.org Wayback Machine with URL "https[b][/b]://web.archive.org/web/*/%s" and set keyword to "a".[/li] [li] Navigate to http[b][/b]://example.com/ [/li] [li] Ok, I want to see what http[b][/b]://example.com/ looked like in the past. in my URL bar, I insert "a " before the URL and hit enter.[/li] [li] Whoops, it doesn't work because the colon and slashes get percent-encoded. Not every useful application of custom search uses the %s substitution for a GET parameter. I suggest having a " Percent-encode special characters? (Recommended)" checkbox.[/li] [/ol] • Of course, for this specific case, an alternative would be to allow a POST request like URL: https[b][/b]://archive.org/searchresults.php POST vars: search=%s&mediatype=web&Submit=BROWSE+HISTORY • Also, JSON-based autofill would be nice. (It existed in Opera 12, but not through search settings GUI. If I remember correctly, you had to edit search.ini manually to enable it for non-default vendors). • It's surely been mentioned already, but the easy "right-click on a form box, Create Custom Search" of O12 would be nice to have back.
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I, too, would appreciate having POST requests and the checkbox for the " Percent-encode special characters? (Recommended)" checkbox. They're pretty minor features, but when they do come in handy, they come in really handy.
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+1
I'm also missing POST search right now.
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At some points since I made this thread a couple of years ago, a couple of things I mentioned have been added to Vivaldi (thanks! :)), namely custom search suggestions and right-click>"Add as search engine".
However, it's still not possible to not percent-encode queries, or make POST-based searches, for sites that use that. Any chance that allowing searches to not %-encode queries, and to make POST-based searches, are in the pipeline as well?
Note: For for looking up pages on archive.org, the example I gave above, it's actually now possible to use https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s&type=urlquery , but for some other things, like saving to archive.org ( http://web.archive.org/save/%s ), the percent-encoding is still a problem. What I've done for myself, for that particular case, is a workaround of making some user javascript (applied through a custom extension) corrects the percent-encoding by searching for the "http[s]%3A%2F%2F" at the beginning of the URL, on page load:
if (location.href.match(/^http:\/\/web.archive.org\/save\/https?%3A%2F%2/)) location.href=decodeURIComponent(location.href);
but that's a pretty specific solution, and wouldn't work for custom searches of some sites that do an instant redirect when the URL doesn't work.
Btw, for a list of some other custom searches I put together a while back, that I find useful,see here.
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@Isildur Another great use for Bookmark Wildcards, whish we had those in Vivaldi some day