The command line for the WWW
At the top of the browser, in the address bar, you can’t just enter URLs. You can also enter a search term and then go directly to the page with the search results for the default search engine, usually Google. This saves you the intermediate step of calling up the search engine’s homepage and having to find your way there first – making sure that the cursor is also in the search field, etc.
Now there is not just Google, but a multitude of websites that offer search functions and I have just as little desire to find my way around their homepages every time I search for something. That’s why I set trovu.net as the default search engine in my browser, not Google. This means that you have to [1] I start every search query in the address bar with an abbreviation that is cryptic for the uninitiated. This means I have a large number of websites at my fingertips. Depending on the abbreviation, I am immediately taken to the search results on the corresponding website. Of course, without moving my fingers away from the keyboard for a second, because Ctrl+L takes me directly to the address bar. At least for a Unix nerd like me, this is ideal, basically the #command line for the WWW. This YouTube short illustrates the principle.
Trovu is developed by Georg Jähnig, like its predecessors Serchilo and FindFind.it. In 2007 he presented Serchilo at the Computational Linguistics Students (TaCoS) conference in Tübingen, which I helped organize. Since then I have used Serchilo and its successors consistently. Since around the 2010s, mobile browsers and search widgets for smartphone home screens have also been able to be configured accordingly. Trovu is free, open source, data-efficient and ad-free and is financed by affiliate links, which means that if I search for something on Trovu, for example on Amazon, and then buy something, Georg gets a small commission.
A variety of useful abbreviations are predefined, but you can also define your own and thus overwrite predefined abbreviations for yourself. So I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo in 2024, but I didn’t have to retrain my muscle memory: The abbreviation g is still responsible for web searches, I simply redefined it so that it calls DuckDuckGo, correspondingly gi for image searches. Accordingly, in 2013, when Google Reader was discontinued, I redefined r so that it now calls Feedly. In this case and on other websites that I visit particularly frequently, I usually don’t use a search term at all, but use the abbreviation like a bookmark. In most cases, Trovu then calls up the homepage of the respective website, but this can also be configured. Editing the abbreviations was done nerdily at Serchilo via a MediaWiki, at FindFind.it via a Drupal-based website and at Trovu again nerdily by pushing a configuration file to GitHub.
Here is a subjective and arbitrary selection of my top 5 use cases for Trovu and their associated abbreviations:
Look up a word in a bilingual online dictionary. For example, if I want to know what tooth means in Danish, I enter the ISO 639-2 code for Danish, da, as an abbreviation, followed by the search word: da zahn. Trovu directs me to an online German-Danish dictionary because it knows that my default language is German. If I want to look up in an English-Danish dictionary instead, I prefix the abbreviation with the corresponding namespace abbreviation, which basically changes my default language for this search query to English and gives me a different selection of defined abbreviations: en.da tooth. If I type in zahn, I get a German-French dictionary, LEO.org. If I want to use dict.cc instead, there is a namespace for that too: dcc.fr zahn. I have defined personal abbreviations for many of my own websites, both with an argument for searching and without an argument for calling up a page: vw for the wiki the Society for the Strengthening of Verbs, vv, to go directly to the list of canceled verbs, vf for the forum of the Society for the Strengthening of Verbs, lt, to enjoy the refreshment! to call up a keyword, ls to search through all definitions there, tn to search my tweet archive, tttt to search my blog. I navigate the various functions of classifieds (formerly eBay classifieds) using abbreviations: kaz to search or to call up the home page, kazn to go directly to the news, kaza for the list of my ads, kazm for my watch list and kaz+ to go directly to the form for placing a new ad.a searches Amazon’s offerings, ao my order history . If I were to use the form on the website, I would constantly confuse the two search fields. If a paywall, an unusably formatted recipe or a page that has disappeared lurks behind a URL, there is often a special service that can help. In combination with Trovu, I just have to jump into the address bar and prefix the problematic URL with an appropriate abbreviation: atd throws it into the paywall remover Archive.today, ckd into the recipe editor Cooked.wiki and wbm into the Wayback Machine archive.
[1] I don’t have to at all. If my search query doesn’t start with a word that is defined as an abbreviation in Trovu, Trovu simply redirects me to my preferred search engine, DuckDuckGo, which is set as the default in Trovu.
(Kilian Evang)