Adding Search Engines to the Vivaldi Browser (followup)

Some search engines can’t be added to Vivaldi by right-click in the search field > “Add as Seach Engine …”, but only manually. The following describes a possible method to add some of those.

If searches do not use a regular search field in the code but a custom one, they cannot be be auto-detected.

How to add such Search engines anyway?

  • Enter e.g. “test” in the search field for a site and press return
  • On the result page: Look if the word “test” is in the address bar
  • If yes: Copy the whole address.
  • If not: Maybe the search engine uses POST and you must use a different method like: How to add search engines that use POST to Vivaldi
  • Open Settings > Search > Search Engines
  • Click at the “+” in the left column to add a new search engine
  • Give it a name e.g “my search engine” and a shortcut e.g. “mine”
  • Paste the URL in the URL field
  • In the URL field, replace “test” with “%s

If you then type “mine some search terms other than test” in the URL field of the address bar and if it works:

Congratulation! You have successfully added the search engine.

If it does not work and the linked article for adding POST searches did not work too, then you might be out of luck and the search engine uses JSON API calls, which is a beast of its own and needs case by case analysis of the web page code, if it is possible at all.

Warning:

  • Those custom search fields were never meant to be added as search and they might break as soon as the site changes its code.
  • The general method described above might not work for other sites, so please test if it works for you and if not, remove the search again by pressing on the “-” in the left column of the search engine editor.

2 replies on “Adding Search Engines to the Vivaldi Browser (followup)”

  1. Brilliant and concise! This is exactly how I added some custom SearX instances to Vivaldi. I can’t remember if Qwant is a default engine or not, but I probably added Qwant and Qwant lite (which no longer seems to work) in this manner too.

    1. Thank You 🙂
      I wrote this blog post because I saw several users reporting bugs in the bugtracker, and I thought I could save me some time by pointing them to this blog post 😀

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