When searching in gnome-shell, there are two buttons towards the bottom of the screen which can be used to search with Wikipedia and Google.
Is there any way to customise these? If, say, I wanted to replace the Google button with one for DuckDuckGo, how would I go about this?
Gnome-Shell search providers are described by XML files in the folder /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers
You will notice two XML files - google.xml and wikipedia.xml
Lets create a new search provider - copy the google.xml file as a template
11.10
sudo cp /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/google.xml /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml
12.04
sudo cp /usr/share/gnome-shell/open-search-providers/google.xml /usr/share/gnome-shell/open-search-providers/duckduckgo.xml
Now lets open the file and change some details to search with duckduckgo:
11.10
sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml
12.04
sudo nano /usr/share/gnome-shell/open-search-providers/duckduckgo.xml
Change the following XML tags:
<ShortName>DuckDuckGo</ShortName>
<Description>DuckDuckGo Search</Description>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}"/>
The only difficult part is finding out how a search engine searches - in duckduckgo I searched for something - you see in the title bar how the search provider adds its search terms
final result
In order to see the changes, you need to restart GNOME Shell by pressing Alt+F2, typing "r" and pressing enter.
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