XSearch How-To

What is it?
XSearch is an easy to use Search Bar designed to replace the various search bars from Microsoft, Netscape or to be used in Mozilla FireFox's Sidebar. It is designed to be far superior to these.

How to Search:
To search, start by typing the search text into the text field at the top. Next continue by selecting which panel you want to use, whether it be a website or an object you're looking for. Do this by clicking on "Sites" or "Objects" just below the text input field. Then select whichever Search Engine you like. XSearch will save whichever engine you used and use it as the defualt next time.

If you want to search for the same thing in a different search engine, just click the button for that engine and click search. You'll notice that the recent searches are saved below (15 by default). You can delete all of these by clicking "Delete" just above them or delete them individually by clicking on the number beside them, i.e. "1. "

If you click on one of these saves searches, it will put that text in the text field, so all you have to do is click the Search button or press return. Note that the search jumps to the top of the list.

How to use as bookmarks:
If you type a web page location (URL) into the text field^* and click the Search button (or press return) it will load the site in the main window and save it as a temporary bookmark. These act similarly to the saved searches and can be very useful because they're faster and more acessible than bookmarks.

^*: URLs are identified as starting with "www.", "http", "ftp:" or "file"

The Setup Panel:
Allows you to change how many searches are saved and how many bookmarks are kept. Also allows you to put ever second search in bold (to make them easier to read).

The Links below:
These are a selection of links chosen by me. Click here to load the page seperately. You can save it and make and use you're own version and use that if you want! Just see below.

Advanced usage/parameters:
Here are some behind the scenes things you can do with XSearch:

You can make XSearch automatically load & show at browser startup by passing the "?url=" parameter to the index page. So if you wanted to load XSearch in the search bar and www.hotmail.com in the main window just set your homepage to:
You can change the background colour of XSearch by passing the "?backcolour=" followed by the HEX value of the colour (default is "e7e7e7", but here's more)
Links Page: For some really heavily used bookmarks you can use your own Links page by passing the "?links=" folowed by the URL of the links page you want. If you don't put a URL in it'll look in /links/<your string>.html for the page. Click here to see my personal ones. Currently in /link/ there is only "norm.html" (default) and "kevs.html" ("?links=kevs").
You can also pass it the "?query=" parameter. This will load XSearch and instantly submit a search for the string you put after "?query=". It will use all the current settings and will add the search to the saved searches list. This is only really used internally (for the FireFox search widget) but you may find a use for it. If you do then e-mail me please.
You can use many of these together by putting an ampersand between them. i.e. "search.html?backcolur=bbbbbb&links=kevs&url=http://www.something.com"

Please do mail me with any recomendations/bugs as I'm always looking to improve this.