Searchio! workflow for Alfred

Auto-suggest search results from multiple search engines and languages.

Contents

• Download and installation
• Usage
  • Configuration
    • Workflow Configuration Sheet
    • In-Workflow Configuration
  • Importing Searches
• Adding Engines
• Licensing, thanks

Supports the following search engines/websites:

• Amazon
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo
• DuckDuckGo Image Search
• eBay
• Google
• Google "I'm Feeling Lucky"
• Google Images
• Google Maps (requires a Google Places API key)
• Naver
• Wikia (only the top ~200 wikis, but you can import any others)
• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary
• Yandex
• YouTube
• plus it can import a search configuration from any website that supports OpenSearch autosuggestions

Download and installation

Download the latest version from the GitHub releases page.

Usage

There are several example searches pre-configured:

• g — Search Google in English
• gd — Search Google in German
• w — Search the English Wikipedia
• wd — Search the German Wikipedia
• yt — Search the United States version of YouTube
• ytd — Search the German version of YouTube

Configuration

The workflow is configured via the searchio keyword and some workflow variables set in the workflow configuration sheet.

Workflow Configuration Sheet

There are some variables in the workflow configuration screen (open the workflow in Alfred Preferences and hit the [𝒙] button):

Name	Description
ALFRED_SORTS_RESULTS	Set to 1 or yes to enable Alfred's knowledge. Set to 0 or no to always show results in the order returned by the API.
GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY	You must set this to use Google Maps search. You can get an API key here.
SHOW_QUERY_IN_RESULTS	Set to 1 or yes to always append the entered query to the end of the results (so you can hit ↑ to select it). If unset (or set to 0 or no), the query will only be shown if there are no other results.

In-Workflow Configuration

• searchio [<query>] — Show workflow settings
  • Update Available … — Shown if there is a new version of the workflow available to download. Action the item to install it.
  • Installed Searches … — View and delete your configured searches
  • All Engines … — View supported engines and add new searches
  • Import Search … — Import a new search configuration from a URL (see Importing Searches)
  • Reload — Regenerate the workflow's Script Filters from your configured searches (and clean the cache). Run this if you screw up the Script Filters or an update overwrites them.
  • Show Query in Results — Turn the option to show the query you entered in the results on/off. The query is added to the end of the results, so you can hit ↑ to go straight to it. The query is always shown if there are no other results.
  • Alfred Sorts Results — Turns Alfred's knowledge on/off. If on, Alfred remembers which result you chose for which query and moves that result to the top. If off, results are always shown in the order they are returned by the API. If on, Show Query in Results cannot guarantee that the query is always the last result.
  • Online Help — Open this page in your browser.
  • Workflow up to Date — You have the latest version of the workflow. Action this item to force a check for a new version.

Importing Searches

Searchio! has the ability to import a search configuration from any website that supports the OpenSearch autosuggestion API.

Run searchio > Import Search … and the workflow will offer to import a search from a URL on your clipboard, the frontmost Safari tab or the frontmost Chrome tab.

It will try to find and read the OpenSearch description at the URL and import it (and the website's icon if available), then ask you to assign a keyword for the search.

NOTE: Although many websites support OpenSearch, few support the autosuggestion API that Searchio! uses. Sites based on MediaWiki usually support the API, so you can add all your favourite Wikia wikis (the built-in Wikia engine only supports the few hundred most popular wikis).

Adding Engines

In addition to the built-in engines, you can add your own definitions in the engines folder in the workflow's data directory. (Enter searchio workflow:opendata to open the data folder in Finder.)

An engine definition looks like this:

{
  "description": "Alternative search engine",
  "jsonpath": "$[*].phrase",
  "title": "DuckDuckGo Images",
  "pcencode": false,
  "variants": [
    {
      "name": "Argentina",
      "search_url": "https://duckduckgo.com/?iax=images&ia=images&kp=-2&kz=-1&kl=ar-es&q={query}",
      "suggest_url": "https://duckduckgo.com/ac/?kp=-2&kz=-1&kl=ar-es&q={query}",
      "title": "DuckDuckGo Images Argentina",
      "uid": "ar-es"
    }
  ]
}

title and description are self-explanatory. jsonpath is the JSON path expression that extracts the search suggestions from the JSON returned by the suggestion API.

The optional pcencode field tells Searchio! to percent-encode the search query rather than use plus-encoding (the default).

variants define the actual searches supported by the search engine, typically one per region or language. All fields are required. suggest_url points to the autosuggestion endpoint and search_url is the URL of the search results that should be opened in the browser. Both URLs must contain the {query} placeholder, which is replaced with the user's search query.

The (optional) icon for your custom engine should be placed in the icons directory alongside the engines one. It should have the same basename as the engine definition file, just with a different file extension. Supported icon extensions are png, icns, jpg and jpeg.

Licensing, thanks

The code in this workflow is released under the MIT Licence.

The icons belong to the respective search engines and websites.

This workflow uses the following libraries:

• Alfred-Workflow
• AwGo
• BeautifulSoup
• docopt
• jsonpath-rw