Investigate search bar integration

[fxkr]

Firefox (& Chrome as well?) support custom search providers.

What's needed to make this project work with that? I think it'd increase usability quite a bit.

[scottlamb]

I was just hoping for the same thing. Chrome supports going to a URL with a %s placeholder. How about this:

1. if window.location.hash is #redirect/blahblahblah, it attempts to resolve blahblahblah and redirects (changes window.location or whatever) on success, displays the error in-line on failure.
2. docs say to add a search engine keyword arn with the placeholder https://link2aws.github.io/#redirect/%s

[fxkr]

Thanks for looking into this!

I like your proposal in general and would appreciate it a lot if it was implemented.

I do have a few comments:

• Standards: There appears to be a standard for search engine integration, OpenSearch, supported by Firefox and Chrome. The standard seems a bit hard to track down these days, but it doesn't seem that hard to implement - add a <link rel="search" ... /> tag and drop in a short XML file. Notably, this allows auto-discovery of the search engine after having used it once. I think it would be cool to support that (maybe in addition to the proposed docs change, maybe instead). But I see it as optional; I'll take any incremental improvement.

• Usability: I hadn't even considered directly redirecting to AWS, I was assuming we would just show the link on our page. It does seem like a very nice and user-friendly approach. I can see two possible problems with this:

  a) Sometimes browsers reject automatic redirects or put in an interstitial for security reasons. I don't know under which exact conditions this happens, but if it does happen, then just staying on our own page and letting the user click the link would be preferable.

  b) Even if the redirect works, are there any scenarios where it would be preferable to stay on our page? The only thing I can come up with is AWS at some points doing its own redirecting, and the user for whatever reason wanting the original link (maybe because it's shorter, or whatever). I'm not aware of this currently being an issue, but it could be.

  I'm not saying no to the auto redirect; it does seem like the most user friendly option and somewhat obvious in retrospect now that you proposed it. Just that these things should be considered by whoever writes the code.