Search The Web

[wilko007]

Hi

Just updated Thunderbird and was generally browsing this page https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/features/ and stumbled upon a feature called Search the Web. However, my search bar only seems to search the emails and other items stored within Thunderbird and doesn't look out onto the internet.

Does anyone know how to activate this feature please?

[tanstaafl]

Global search, classic search (edit -> find -> search messages) and the quick filter bar only search folders. However, if you select some text in a message, right click on it, and select "search ..." from the context menu it will search the web for that text. This was originally called open search and had a pane where you could select the search provider and it would return the results in a tab in Thunderbird. However, they changed the implementation and dropped that pane, and the search results are now shown using your systems default browser. There are add-ons available to change the search provider. The one for Google works, the one for Duck Duck Go only supports the old API (last time I checked). It defaults to using Bing.

[wilko007]

Thanks for the reply tanstaafl but according to the page I linked to in the original post, you should be able to search google, b!ng or whatever straight from the search bar at the top of Thunderbird. When the search word is typed in a list appears asking if you want to search your emails or the internet via your preferred search engine.

I've added google to my list using an add-on and can, as you say, search words by highlighting them and choosing - Search Google for 'word' by right-clicking and it will open my deafult browser and do as expected. But the search bar function doesn't seem to work. I'd ideally like this to then also open the page inside Thunderbird rather than opening another browser.

Am I asking too much?

[tanstaafl]

Some of the text on that web page is out of date. For example, Thunderbird doesn't support facebook chat anymore. According to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=923656 global search used to have a list box to let you search the web but they removed that for privacy reasons.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677421 mentions some of the old settings such as glodaComplete.webSearch.label and glodaComplete.webSearch.label.truncated which don't exist by default anymore. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=2420963

[wilko007]

Yeah I notice Facebook isn't listed. I thought I got to this page from the Mail Start Page after updating, which is a bit odd if they have removed some of these features.

Thanks for letting me know tanstaafl, appreciate the reply.