January 09, 2008 by sharky
Adding BitTorrent Websites to the Search bar.
Open Search plugins can speed up the process of searching for torrents without having to actually visit the Bittorrent websites first in order to do the torrent searching. Simply put, these are little additions to the search bar services that can be selected from within the browser. For example, you can add Mininova.org or BTJunkie.org to your list of available search criteria in your browser, and select them from the dropdown menu when entering a search string.
But first let’s explain the available search bar options already implemented in the browsers:
Many people are not even aware that these search bar settings can be changed - if you use Internet Explorer but prefer Google’s search over MS Live Search, you can change the default search engine. You may already be aware of the existing ones. If you use IE (version 7+), the default search setting is the Microsoft’s LIVE SEARCH. So when you enter a search keyword(s) in the top-right corner, it launches Live Search as the page showing your search results. If you use Firefox (version 2+), the default is Google for the searching. Depending on what plugins and toolbars you’ve already installed will lead to different available options.
Changing the default settings in Firefox:
Launch Firefox, and go to the left of the search window, and click on the “G” or small arrow beside it. You can select a different search engine to perform your searches from the dropdown menu; whatever you select will now become your default search engine in Firefox.
Changing the default settings in Explorer:
Launch Explorer, and go to the left of the search window, and click on the arrow next to magnifying glass. Yeah, Microsoft makes this very small because they really don’t want you find it, since it’s their search engine as the default.
To change the default setting to Google (or any other), you’ll need to click on “Change Search Defaults…” and select Google as the new one.
But enough of all that - it’s not what we want to discuss. We want to show you how to add some torrent search engines to the list. Here’s a site that offers many different search plugins in support of torrent sites.
Adding the torrent ‘Open Search’ plugins in Firefox. (versions 2+)
Launch Firefox and visit www.searchplugins.net. For this, do a search for “torrent“. To broaden your search results, change the radio button from “tag” to “title (keyword)” and “title (exact)“.
Click on small blue bar. Click Add to finish the process:
In the top corner of Firefox, click on the small arrow - you’ll now see a listing for YouTorrent in your available search engines:
Add as many as you want. Now you can enter a search term, say for example “Beowulf”, and scroll through the list highlighting each one after another to conduct the searches. This accomplishes two things: One; you only have to enter a search term once. Two; you don’t have to manually visit each torrent website through your saved Bookmarks.
Adding the ‘Open Search’ plugins in Explorer. (versions 7+)
Same instructions as for Firefox, launch Explorer and visit www.searchplugins.net. Click a torrent site, but this time you’ll have to click “Add Provider” in the popup window. The new torrent website will now be listed among the available search engines. Again, add as many as you like, and enter your search term just once while scrolling through your list of available torrent search engines.
Archived by FSFmirror
