this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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It's not clear to me how browsers are supposed to make the list of search engines open and not bound to money. Especially for closed source stuff, how would it work? Should they have a git repo to which search engines can make pull requests to to be included in the list of search engines a user can choose from when first starting up Safari?
If the list and process of getting on the list is closed, then one can always just assume that to get on the list, it requires money. But if that's made illegal... yeah, not sure how this should be solved.
I mean, you just have to specify the format of the url that the search engine uses, and then the browser just formats in your search string into that. This has existed for years, if not over a decade, at this point, at least on desktop.
Firefox solved this long time ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-engine-firefox-ios
In desktop Firefox there is also a format in which webpage can inform it's a search engine and the browser would list option to add it in the search selection (Firefox has a selector to choose search engine on each query if you want).
Any user can add their own search engine in desktop versions of Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. Not sure about mobile versions. IIRC search sites can even put an icon in the URL bar to automate the process.