Google Desktop Suggest in Firefox

Firefox provides a dedicated box to search the internet. You can use that box to search your computer with Google Desktop as well.

I am developing a Google Desktop Suggest Firefox plugin, that works similar to Google Suggest and the Google Deskbar that comes with Google Desktop. This plugin would provide the suggestions directly in the Firefox search box.

Status of the Google Desktop Suggest project

I have a rudimentary version of Google Desktop Suggest running on my system. Firefox uses javascript and I am not that good of a javascript coder. If you would like to help out download the .xpi file.

An .xpi file is a regular .zip file with a special structure. Rename the downloaded file to google-desktop-suggest.zip to view the contents. To make the current version work on your system, you will have to edit two files so that they contain your Google Desktop key. These files are:

• searchplugins/google desktop suggest.src
• defaults/preferences/suggest.js

In both files replace the string S0meL3tt3rsAndNumb3rs with your Google Desktop key. Your key is the string between &s= and ?q= in the url you obtained on the Integrate Google Desktop into Firefox page.

For example your key is S0meL3tt3rsAndNumb3rs if your url is:
http://127.0.0.1:4664/search&s=S0meL3tt3rsAndNumb3rs?q=&btnG=Search+Desktop

The following issues are outstanding:

• Update the .xpi to use the proper Google Desktop key on a per user basis
• Selecting an item in the autocomplete list should request the cache_url, rather than perform a Google Desktop search on the selected text
• Display html formatted results, rather than flat text in the autocomplete list
• This extension is based on the Google Suggest extension by Ben Goodger at Google. A lot of the code has not been updated to reflect this is a different extension

The meat of the code is in the components/suggest.js file, so probably that is where you want to look first.

Please email me if you need help getting this to work, or if you would like to contribute code to this project: horopter(at)gmail.com