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/ 3 min read

Surfing Productivity

Google was good enough for a long time, but now its chatgpt. But unless you have some gpt4-o usage you dont get realtime results.

But thats where Perplexity comes in, but when you make perplexity the default, you cant do the domain based searches.

The search queries often done for finding the right domain but you dont want to type it or go through that thinking process.

So with multiple types of search queries (answers, definitions, right domain) and multiple really good providers, we need better tooling to search on the right provider for each query.

In theory a LLM could do the finding the right provider part for you but this wouldnt be really accurate without compromising user privacy.

Bangs already solve them

Brave and Duckduckgo already implements bangs. Bangs are great, like when you put a !g after a brave search it will search on google. very cool and awesome until you need a custom provider that the maintainer of bangs wont just add.

Browser keywords

This is great too. Like when you enter youtube or @youtube and press tab the url bar changes to searching on youtube. Nothing wrong with this too but thats not even the most productive way.

Own providers, Own static search page

This is why I had the opinion and the idea of maintaining my own providers list and having my own New tab page on a browser. The new tab points to a static HTML page which loads your own providers and search url structures. Its a static page that can be hosted for free on github / cloudflare pages.

My current providers.json file looks like this.

[
{
"title": "Google",
"url": "https://www.google.com/search?q=${query}"
},
{
"title": "YouTube",
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=${query}"
},
{
"title": "TikTok",
"url": "https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=${query}"
},
{
"title": "ChatGPT",
"url": "https://www.chatgpt.com/q=${query}"
},
{
"title": "Perplexity",
"url": "https://www.perplexity.ai/search?q=${query}"
},
{
"title": "Reddit",
"url": "https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=${query}"
},
{
"title": "1337x",
"url": "https://1337x.to/srch?search=${query}"
},
{
"title": "Index Of",
"url": "https://www.google.com/search?q=Index+of+(${query})"
},
{
"title": "Phind",
"url": "https://www.phind.com/search?q=${query}"
},
{
"title": "Code",
"url": "https://github.com/search?q=${query}&type=code"
}
]

These are very opinionated, I read code a lot so I have a quicker way to jump to github search, for torrenting 1337x and the index of trick too.

Its personal and it wont likely work for you but thats the point.

Keyboard shortcuts

My search screen also has keyboard shortcuts from right to left. So when you type in the search and press ALT+1 it would search on google, and I could actually come back to the search page and do ALT+2 and so on.

The mouse is probably the biggest time waster in the computing industry, but most people do not realize this because it is such an integral part of our computing experience