Using Yahoo! search in Opera
I was recently at BSDCan 2006 which is a great yearly BSD conference in Ottawa, Canada organized by Dan Langille. There were several Yahoo! employees attending which made me think a bit more about why I was using Google as my primary search engine when they run that other operating system, and Yahoo run FreeBSD (and support FreeBSD in various ways).
So, when I got home I decided to find out how to get Opera 8.54 to use Yahoo search in the little permanent search box. It turned out to be rather simple (at least with my quick hack). Opera keeps the search engine configuration in .opera/search.ini and in the default version installed on my system has Google is the first entry and Opera Web as nr. 2. I never use Opera Web so I decided to simply remove Opera Web, bump Google to be the second search engine and add an entry for Yahoo! as the first search engine.
I have been running with Yahoo! search for a bit more than a week now and it hasn’t really made a big difference, in that I still find what I’m searching for, so I have no current plans to switch back.
Before editing any config files remember to make a backup of the files, just in case….
So, to do the same in your Opera just open .opera/search.ini in your favorite editor (which obviously should be Emacs), delete the [Search Engine 2] section, change the Google entry [Search Engine 1] header into [Search Engine 2], and then finally add the new [Search Engine 1] section as shown below.
[Search Engine 1]
Name=&Yahoo
URL=http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8
Query=
Key=y
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=utf-8
Search Type=0
Verbtext=17063
Position=-2
Nameid=0
June 16th, 2006 at 20:48
[...] Unfortunately, shortly after the presentation was announced, it had to be cancelled because the legal department at Google hadn’t sanctioned it (yet). Google works in mysterious ways… Of course, I really like what they are doing with the Summer of Code, but with all the work Yahoo! has done for FreeBSD, I’m more and more thinking that Simon is right. [...]
July 13th, 2006 at 1:21
Opera 9 allows one to add search engines through gui, with a right-click on the search field. As of yet, the order of engines cannot be rearranged from gui, though as usual it is possible to do it manually in search.ini.
August 29th, 2006 at 2:22
Amazing trick, my friend! In opera 9, I didn’t require this procedure to add yahoo, but I modified the second search engine to yahoo, and added the URL which you gave. It is now working as a wonder! Fantastic!