Google search error
this only started happening today. When i use the builtin search from the tool bar and search words with space between them then the search is spoiled and i dont get proper results. i.e. When i typed "Free Games", it looked for "free%20games".

This didnt happen before
thomas

hmm... still works for me. if you leave whitespace in the search query, it will always get converted to %20 in order to be sent as a URL, but google usual handles this just fine, as far as i can tell. if you're looking for a phrase, you can try connecting the words as in free.games instead of using quotes, and see if that works any better.

I am encountering the same problem as thomas. It has only been happening in the last two days.

I know if I want a search to have to fine a page with both words I always put a + in between them like free+games

yes Rhys i agree with u its been the last couple of days, before it worked just fine. I believe google has changed its script for searching or something like that. I suggest developers here have another look at it before releasing 0.6.5 version
thanks
thomas

i just realized that i'm using this:

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "www.google.com/search?q=");

instead of the '/keyword' URL used by default (i was never clear on what the advantage of that syntax was to begin with) which is maybe why it still seems to work fine for me... you might want to try it. maybe google did change something related to the '/keyword' bit...

There actually seems to be even a bigger problem with searches containing umlaut letters like ä, ö, ü etc. (letters with diacritic marks). I think that Google has somehow switched to UTF-8 or something like that. That problem does not occur when you enter the query string directly from the browser but it happens when you use the "Search" command. The results vary very much. E.g. when searching for the Swedish word "hjälpa" (help) I got 218,000 results from the browser and 85 results from "Search".

This probably has to do with sending strings over to Google but it's quite annoying.

After some thinking, I just wrote a macro

google {
open(http://www.google.com)
}

and edited my toolbars.cfg so that the search button now means

macros(google)

instead of ID_NAV_SEARCH

Then I went to Google and let it set me a cookie with my preferences (language + 100 results per page).

Thus now my search button opens Google search page. This is the best solution I could find yet.

it sounds like maybe they've just gotten stricter about what they'll accept as a URL... i guess the cleaning up is being done as part of the web front end now, or something... which would allow for a more efficient engine, i guess, but it also means you have to submit proper URLs... maybe the search function can be re-written to 'clean up' whatever goes into the form filed before it sends it out... or is that just a stock part of mfcembed?

I have the same problem also.it should definately work as Thomas entered it ie. "free Games".that's the proper way.

ok, i'm going to re-emphasize this, in case i did my usual poor job of explaining things the first time round...

the problem seems to only exist when using the default "google.com/keyword/<query>" search URL, and can be corrected very easily by adding this line to prefs.js (or to a user.js file, better yet) in the same directory:

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "www.google.com/search?q=");

which, AFAIK, has always been the way to subit a query to google - i'm not sure why the other one is the default for that preference. but that's all it is - a *pref setting* - and not a hard-wired part of k-meleon, so just change it, and hopefully the next release will avoid this problem by not using that as the default. does that all make sense?

maybe they'll build something into the preferences interface for changing the search URL in the next release, too...

incidentally, i tried the same search as andres, entering "hjälpa" into the k-meleon search box AND the one on the google site. what i noticed was that from k-meleon it was encoded as "hj%C3%A4lpa" which was then reconstructed by google as "hjälpa"... producing only 85 results. on the other hand, when entered at the google web site, it was encoded (properly?) as "hj%E4lpa" and correctly handled, giving thousands of results... so something's probably not right in the way the search box handles those characters, which is, as stated, a much bigger problem. unfortunately, i don't know much about character encoding, so i can only scratch my head...

sure it can be changed by the user,but it is still a Bug that needs to be corrected in future versions of KM. I typed "free Games" in Opera's Google search Bar and got the correct results, that's the way it should be in KM as well if we want it to be as good or better.Not everyone is comfortable with making their own changes to a Browser for it to work properly and should not have to.

you're right.

but i'd hate to think that people would decide what search engine to use just because that was what some browser's default was set to.

even if that is the reality.

Yes,it will also be nice if you were able to choose which Search Engine to use,however,I don't have a problem using Google,I think it's a good choice.

Better yet (I think so anyway), I used the Google Search browser button javascript command for the macro. This not only does the search but also allows highlighted words on the page to be searched if tied to the toolbar button as Andres suggests.

google {
open(javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;i<frames.length;i++){q=frames.document.getSelection();if(q)break;}if(!q)void(q=prompt('Keywords:',''));if(q)location.href='http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q='+escape(q));
}

I have a similar problem. When I type a search in the search dialog free games
google searches on free free frfree free frfree free frfree free.
Typing hello into the search field returns Q in the google search page.
Any help with this would be appreciated.

I have the same probem, it just started today. whenever I type something into the search. when it finally hits google it is repeated like the message before.


Rick

fix:

user_pref("kmeleon.general.searchEngine", "www.google.com/search?q=");

added to prefs.js (or user.js).

Yeah, the same error occured on my system too now. Never happened before yesterday. Weirdness.

And thanks, po, that fix eliminated the issue.