I have been looking for a way to integrate a search function in SwyxIt! that should be easy to implement, and be able to adapt to most searches. I would not like all the information to pop up without the user having any control, so basically I wanted to have a integration that would let me search only if I wanted to search.

The solution I came up with was a mix of SwyxIt! Web Extension and a PHP script on our web server.

The script accepts four parameters;

url, number, name and txt.

The url is the base URL of the search. Like if you are using Bing the base URL is ‘http://www.bing.com/search?q=’

WebExtension is configured to build the URL using my PHP-script, so on external incoming calls it will trigger the following URL to make a search in Bing:

http://www.ucit.no/url/url.php?url=http://www.bing.com/search%3Fq=&number=%SelLinePeernumberPublicFormat%&name=%SelLinePeername%&txt=Search%20using%20Bing

As you can see, the question mark in the Bing URL needs to be replaced with the URL encoding value, or else my web server will think that q is a parameter meant for itself. To make a search string you need to include either number or name (or both).

You can find a list of URL encoding values here: URL Encoding

If you want to check out the project, you can download the skin ProPack 3xBING.cab. The skin will only work with SwyxIt! 6.25, so you need to run at least SwyxWare 6.20.