Clever uses for Opera’s “Create Search”
3
Opera is one of our favorite browsers on Netbook Network, featuring fast browsing speeds coupled with a wide selection of features. We’ve covered the new stuff found in Opera 11, and this time, we’re going to focus on just one of its features: Create Search. The Create Search feature allows you to use any search box you find on a webpage and use it right in the address bar using user-specified keywords. Most people probably have Google, Bing, or Yahoo in place already, but there’s a few clever uses for the Create Search feature that can help you browse and find content faster.
To use the “Create Search” feature, simply right click in a search box and hit “Create Search…”. From here, you can define a name and keyword for your search engine. The keyword is probably the most important – it’s what you first type into the address bar that tells Opera what search engine it’s going to use. For example, if I wanted to add Google to my search engines, I could use the keyword “google” so whenver I would want to Google something, I would type “google ___” in the address bar.
Here are just a few of the many things you can do with Opera’s Create Search feature that come in handy.
- Defining words: Add a search engine for Dictionary.com with the keyword “define”, and every time you run across a word you don’t know, type “define ___” in the address bar and dictionary results will appear.
- As a calculator: Wolfram|Alpha is a very powerful online tool that allows you to calculate things from simple math equations to unit conversions to 3D graphing. I use the keyword “=” so whenever I need to calculate something, I type “= ___” and W|A will spit out results.
- Movies: Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB are both excellent movie-info sites. I use the keyword “movie” and by typing in “movie ___” with the site of your choice to bring up movie information.
- Ratings/Reviews: Metacritic offers a solid summary of movie, TV, games, and music reviews. Hook up the keyword of your choice and viewing the metascore of a movie, TV, game, or album is only a few key presses away.
Don’t forget that just about anything works with the Create Search feature. If you find that you’re searching the same site multiple times, create a search engine and save yourself a few clicks – above are just few of the many things you can do with this awesome feature.
I’m very disappointed that Opera still does not let to configure icons for these browser search options, nor it does not use their favicons.
My impressions on update from v10 to v11.01:
Pros/likes:
- Nice tab animation.
- Private browsing.
- Increased browsing speed.
- Fixed JavaScript bugs – my Opera 10.YZ crashed on some web pages with complex scripting, such as sourceforge.net.
Cons/dislikes:
- Inaccurate GUI alignment in some places — due to a new GUI library/sybsystem?
- The ‘Delete Private Data’ tool now crashes.
- The weird menu button instead of the regular menu. And no way back to get it back — isn’t it?
- Saving pages on a disk works less reliable (comparing with v10). Wrong result formatting on most complex pages. Just continuing to use Mozilla for that purpose.
BTW, Brian, thanks for the Wolfram|Alpha idea! I added it for myself, and spotted that Opera actually does use the favicon for search engine items. But for some reasons it does not pick up an icon for Wikipedia’s language locales.
From v10 to v11, I believe they updated their SVG library to an engine called Vega. Everyone’s beginning to adapt to the menu button – Firefox 4, just released, almost seems to have copied Opera in a lot of ways and also includes a menu button. I rarely use the built-in delete private data tool on browsers and use CCleaner instead.
Yes, Opera will pull icons from the favicon. Not sure why some sites work and some don’t.