I’ve always been extremely irritated by the simplicity of google’s search results. They require a lot more manual work to navigate than I can tolerate, browsing forward and backward, spawning a new tab to save interesting result, clicking between tabs, etc. Way too much clicking and jumping and tabbing and loss of context!
My lack of tolerance fuels my attempts to engineer workarounds. There’s no way you can live without google’s results any more, so the workarounds have centered on re-engineering the results page. The old perl scraper that I’ve used for the past 4-5 years has required an update every six months or so, but I’ve kept with it until the recent past (it no longer works). This weekend, I hammered out a better way (please insert trumpet blare):
The Google Results Walker Firefox addonI’ve posted it to the Mozilla Addons site (aka AMO), and I’m learning the hoops through which you have to jump to get “published” there. Looks like I’ll need lots of good reviews. If you want to help me out, sign in to the Mozilla addons site and post a review at the public page. NOTE that you have to actually provide a relevant full-sentence comment with the review, or, according to the Addon Reviewing Guide, it will just be deleted! Geesh!
There is a huge backlog of requests for new addons to be published. In the end, I may have to sign up to be an addon editor to get the job done. :>
It’s still a little rough and there’s a lot more I want to do with it. Check the wiki page for the current todo list.
