Search WaniKani via chrome search bar

This post has been mostly copied from the Bunpro topic, but I think it would have a lot of value on WaniKani too.

I would like to be able to search WaniKani without having to navigate to the site first. In chrome’s toolbar I can type the first letter of a site I commonly use (e.g. “i” for imdb), hit “tab”, and then I can search the site directly. I believe what would be necessary to get this to work is something in the URL indicating that searching is happening. For example, for imdb, that URL is http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s, where %s is the user query that is typed into the search bar.

I think you could use WaniKani — Log in, but by adding a query parameter and using it when navigated to directly, I believe this chrome toolbar search would work as well.

Let me know if anything is unclear. Thanks!

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That would be a great feature - I love being able to do that on other sites.

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Start your search with site:wanikani.com

I’m talking about being able to do the radical/kanji/vocab search that’s on the dashboard.

It does look like you can set up Google to index around paywalls, but what does this ability offer you that the dashboard search doesn’t?

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I wouldn’t have to navigate to the dashboard first which saves time. It also makes WaniKani more consistent with how searching other websites works, which makes using it more intuitive.

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Since I use keyword searches all the time I often think about how nice this would be for WaniKani.

You inspired me to write a little script as a workaround: https://community.wanikani.com/t/userscript-search-wanikani-via-browser-search-bar/
Took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out how to trigger the search :wink:

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I was gonna do the same if it wasn’t made a real feature. :slight_smile:

I’m just not very patient, I guess :wink:

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@viet @oldbonsai What are the chances of this becoming a real WaniKani feature?

I thought about this one yesterday on my commute, and it’s a little chunk of work since we’d need to make the search trigger both via JS and browser query strings. It’s a reasonable request and we’ll put it on the list, but it’s going to be low priority — it’ll take a while for us to get to it.

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Genuinely curious, what currently has high priority?

(I apologize if this question sounds accusatory; it’s not supposed to.)

Wouldn’t that just require checking the query string on page load and then triggering the current JS code with the given value (plus some validation)? I’m not questioning your priorities; I’m just curious if there’s more to it that I’m missing since I obviously don’t know the inner workings of your code.

Mainly, but every feature takes a bit more work than meets the eye. Poking at edge cases, making sure it doesn’t break in different scenarios or take malicious input, and then writing tests against it to make sure we keep it running — it all takes time, and we’re a small team, so we have to pick our battles carefully. It’s on the list, though, for sure. :slight_smile:

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