
Safari didn't offer this feature, but years back, I discovered a third party Safari plugin called Inquisitor, at the time the work of an independent developer. Among the features it offered, it also allowed users to also add and switch between search engines with a single query.

But what I loved most was how easy he made it to add search plugins. You see, for Firefox, I wrote several search plugins starting at the end of 2004 and beginning of 2005, using the Sherlock format. Some of these (Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! Widgets) have been replaced by OpenSearch versions uploaded by other people, but some of the early ones remain in case you want to see what I'm talking about (Cal Berkeley plugin from February 15, 2005).
With Inquisitor, on the other hand, we could simply use a variable representing the query within the URL parameter used in any given site search. For example, if I searched IMDB for "Memento", the URL ended up looking like this: "http://www.imdb.com/find?q=memento;s=all". At that point, I would be able to replace the "memento" search query with a variable in the Inquisitor settings to get this: "http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%@;s=all", where %@ just happened to be the variable used by Inquisitor.
Suddenly, I could add just about anything site within seconds, from Finance quote searches to torrent sites to corporate intranet searches.

It didn't cross my mind that someone could easily top this, but Google did just that with Chrome. When typing a domain like imdb.com into the hybrid URL-search bar, the right side of the bar hints that you can hit the "tab" key to type a search query for a search within that site (in this case, imdb.com).


Most major dedicated search engines try to facilitate site-specific searches these days, but for times when you want to perform a site search, the browser has evolved to help get you there.
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