I do most of my work on Macs and most of my surfing I do in Firefox. One of the main reasons I use Firefox is that with its huge choice of add-ons it is highly customisable. But there are some valueble add-ons for Safari as well, for instance Inquisitor, a search plug-in.

How it works

Inquisitor replaces the current search bar functionality in Safari with a search drop down menu.

According to David Watanabe, who developed Inquisitor, it is like Spotlight for the web: Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with suggestions to refine your search. Click on a suggestion for a refined search and by default a page with Yahoo search results will open. (Spotlight is the search engine included in the MacOS.)

Inquisitor will auto complete your words. You can add more search engines with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Inquisitor supports eight languages beyond English: Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

Recently, Inquisitor was acquired by Yahoo. In the latest version, 3.2, the search results component is rebuilt around the new Yahoo! Search BOSS platform.

Is it any good?

Inquisitor looks good and it is adds functionality (suggestions for refining your search) to Safari’s search bar.

It can be customized in Safari’s Preference pane, where you choose the number of search results and suggestions you want. You can choose to search Google or Yahoo in a number of languages. You can also choose to add shortcuts to the drop-down menu that will search for your query on e.g. Amazon, Flickr, and Wikipedia.

Inquisitor is good and it makes searching in Safari easier and more fun.

For more Safari add-ons see Pimp My Safari.