Building Bookmarklets

Favouritelets

I wrote a while ago about programming bookmarklets so that they would work as normal bookmarks or “smart” bookmarks depending on the context, such as searching Rotten Tomatoes for the selected text on a webpage, or just going to the site if no text is selected.

Since then I’ve gradually extended my collection of bookmarklets, and moved a few back to asking before loading a site (since my broadband is now capped I don’t load any page unless I have to!).  I’ve found the Bookmarklet Builder at SubSimple.com to be really useful for building these, and I’ve shamelessly copied many from around the web.

Stealth Bookmarklets

I’ve been using bookmarklets for a while now (apart from a brief hiatus when an update to Safari broke them!) and they are very useful.  The kind of useful that you forget that not everyone has them and if you’re stranded without them you can’t believe how you managed before they came along!

Just recently I’ve started to move bookmarklets from my bookmarklets folder in my bookmarks into my bookmark bar, replacing the normal bookmarks.  For example in my bookmarks bar I have links for Google, Google Maps, Apple, Wikipedia and so on.

My new line up looks the same but is a little bit more useful, due to the new “stealth” bookmarklets.  These seem like normal bookmarks, but when you click on them when there is some text selected on the current page they use them as input for that service.

For example if I’m reading an article and want to look up something on Wikipedia, I highlight that term, and click on the link.  The browser loads the page as usual, except it brings up a page related to my term, automagically.

Here’s the ones I’ve put together.  If you want to use them drag them to your bookmark bar or favourites.  I’ve only tested them in Safari but I’m sure it’ll work in other browsers too.

Wikipedia

Google Maps

Google

Search vs URL

Something that happens to me quite a lot is when I’m trying to type into the search box in Safari I accidentally type into the Address field, and end up going to latest-news-on-apple.com which of course drops out with an error.  But when you think about it URLs almost never go in the search field and search terms never go in the Address field.  Why are they not the same bar with some intelligent URL parsing technology to separate the two?

I know some browsers use a single letter keyword to indicate a search rather than a URL but surely when Google Calendar can figure out when to put an appointment just from the natural language then a browser can figure out what’s a URL and what’s not?  A keyword search is nice – but it could be so much more.

And the possibilities go on – how about some AI that intelligently figures out trends in image searches and redirects likely image searches from web search?  I suspect Google already does something like this in their search algorithm by placing likely hits at the top.

Note to Apple, Microsoft et al:  Feel free to steal this idea and use it without credit to me – as long as we get better browsers out of it!