Custom Searches with Alfred

If you use Mac OS X, then you are probably already aware of the Alfred productivity app. Even though there is a native OS Spotlight, I find that Alfred suites my needs better. One of these gems is… Custom Search.

Custom Web & URL Searches

Alfred comes with built-in Web Searches such as google, translate, twitter, wiki, imdb, facebook, weather, etc… but it also lets you create your own custom search.

You can create a custom search of your own by identifying a website that supports URL parameters. For example, let’s create a Custom Search for Stack Overflow.

Here we provide the Search URL including the {query} that represents the value we provide to Alfred.

Now I can use the custom search by triggering Alfred with my new keyword and a search term like the following… stack reactjs flux

Can I Use?

If you are writing cross-browser web sites and need to search for feature support, then you are probably visiting the Can I Use? website fairly frequently.

For this purpose, why not make a caniuse Alfred Custom Search… http://caniuse.com/#search={query}

Dev Docs

The API documentation for all the technologies we use are spread out all over the internet. Dev Docs is a handy online tool that allows you to search across many technologies to find API level documentation. They currently support HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, Grunt, Lo-Dash, Sass, SVG, and over 30 more APIs.

For this I’ve created a devdocs custom search… http://devdocs.io/#q={query}