About the project

Web Web Ancillary Search (searchApis in the base project) is a tool supporting the visual definition of search engines from the UI of any Web page. This allow end users to slightly perform ancillary searchs over the Web. More info at https://sites.google.com/site/webancillarysearches/

System Requirements

• Firefox 57 or Chrome 64.0.3282.140 onwards
• NPM 5.6.0 (maybe other versions work)

Building the extension

Clone this repo:

$ git clone https://gabybosetti@bitbucket.org/gabybosetti/web-ancillary-search.git

Download the dependencies:

$ cd web-ancillary-search
$ npm install
$ npm run web-ext-prepare

If the last command throws you an error, please:

$ cd src
$ npm install

Installing the extension in Chrome

After performing the steps described above,

1. Open "chrome://extensions/" in Chrome
2. Click "Load not packaged extension"
3. Select any file in your add-on's root directory (web-ancillary-search/src)

or run the following scripts,

$ npm run start:chrome # npm run start:chromium, for chromium

Debugging the extension in Chrome

You can debug and see logs from the Webconsole and the Browser's console. It depends on which kind of script you need to log/debug (content/backgroun scripts). The browser's console can be accessed

If you are trying to debug a "popup script", you should prevent the popups to be closed. To do so, click the "4 sqaures icon" in the right-top area of the browser's toolbox.

Using the tool

To define a new service, go to the results page of a search engine (execute a search). E.g. at the NYPL site

Then, click on the extension's toolbar button to define a new service. To do so, follow the steps presenten in the sidebar.

To use an existing service, highlight some text in any Web page and right-click. Choose "Search with" and select some of the available services.

You can watch demo videos at this YouTube playlist