Let Kagi extension redirect bangs

Thibaultmol

Do firefox/chrome extensions get special privileges over the address bar?
The reason why i'm asking is because: i'm wondering if it was possible to intercept kagi searches.

so currently: i have kagi set as the default search engine on firefox. Which means that even if I do !bang query this is still sent to the kagi servers to then redirect to the right url.
But what if the extension had a cache of all bangs including custom bangs. and could simply see 'ah, the user is doing !bang, i'll redirect him directly`.
Saving a server roundtrip to the kagi servers and immediately going to that site.

This is probably easier to do on Orion, but i'm curious if the firefox/chromium api's even would allow for something like this.

eirk

What do you think about just using an existing extension?
https://github.com/psidex/CustomBangSearch
https://github.com/WhistlingZephyr/banger

Thibaultmol

eirk I haven't actually looked it up but at least this proves that it's possible.

While this is good, these obviously wouldn't be synchronized to kagi's lists and def not include custom bangs you set.

But hey, kagi might be able to use the code if license compatible to add it to their app, and just add a syncing feature to it

Thibaultmol

sidenote: when making the docs for this feature: feel free to add that this helps with privacy because if the extension is installed, the query won't even be sent to the server? (i guess?)

LucasOe

Currently, you can use bangs either at the beginning or end of your query: !g query and query !g both work. However, if the query is a link, appending a bang doesn't work.

For example, !ccc [amazon link] works, but not [amazon link] !ccc. It's a minor thing, but having this feature would probably make it possible to have bangs work at the end of a link.

LucasOe

And keep in mind, that for the best results, this should also work with custom bangs. That means the Kagi extension would have to communicate with the servers to fetch the users' settings, in that case, a roundtrip to the servers is still required, unless the settings are stored or cached locally.