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Searchio! workflow for Alfred

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

Searchio! Demo

Contents

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Supports the following search engines/websites:

<a name="download-and-installation"></a> Download and installation

Download the latest version from the GitHub releases page.

<a name="usage"></a> Usage

There are several example searches pre-configured:

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Configuration

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

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Workflow Configuration Sheet

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

NameDescription
ALFRED_SORTS_RESULTSSet 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_KEYYou must set this to use Google Maps search. You can get an API key here.
SHOW_QUERY_IN_RESULTSSet 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.

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In-Workflow Configuration

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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).

<a name="adding-engines"></a> 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.

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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: