Automaticly get the favicon of the website for the ICON to the custom search engine

[Babesun]

Almost every website has a favicon, and we can get the imageurl in the source code of the webpage. Why not set it for the ICON of the custom searches?

And, please add "www.baidu.com" to the default web search list, it's very popular in China.

Thank you~

[deanishe]

14 hours ago, Babesun said:

Almost every website has a favicon

 

It's not quite that simple. A favicon is often tiny (max. 48px), as it's meant to be displayed in browser tabs or bookmark lists. Alfred icons are (ideally) 256px.

 

I agree that it would be pretty cool if Alfred tried to fetch an icon for web searches that don't have one, but if you check the output of RealFaviconGenerator, you'll see that favicons are fairly Serious Business. There's quite a bit of effort involved in extracting the right favicon from an HTML page (assuming an appropriate one is even available).

 

15 hours ago, Babesun said:

please add "www.baidu.com" to the default web search list

 

Disagree, tbh. Alfred is fundamentally an English-language tool (its UI is English-only, so Alfred users pretty much need to be comfortable with English). As such, it makes sense to include a bunch of English-language searches, as they're likely to be at least useable for (if not useful to) all users.

 

If Alfred went down the "Baidu rabbit hole" and included Baidu and Yandex etc., there would be a lot of clutter that is of zero interest to the majority of users.

 

What I would suggest instead would be a stickied thread in the forum where we can keep a list of the best web searches for different languages. That way, someone could add a whole bunch of searches for the language(s) they're interested in within a couple of minutes.

 

How does that sound?

 

[nikivi]

Shameless plug, but I made a workflow of my own that tries to solve this by simply including every website you can possibly search for in one big list. Added Baidu to the list too. ?

[mareoraft]

+1 for the favicon.  I create bookmarks and custom web searches all the time, and I'm assuming others do too.  It's time consuming to find an image online and add it as an icon.  It would be very convenient if Alfred automatically grabbed the favicon (when possible) and populated the icon field in the form.  Of course the user could still override it with a custom icon.

 

I would suggest using a third-party tool like https://favicongrabber.com/service-api-reference and see where it goes from there (higher resolution images could come later).  The http request can be made from the user's local machine, and when it responds an icon can be populated.

Edited December 7, 2018 by mareoraft

[SummerChill]

+1 for the favicon.   Even if the size of the icon is not the same, it is better than nothing,Setting up one by one takes a lot of time, With the icon, it is very obvious, The icons of many websites are the root directory followed by "/favicon.ico"

@mareoraft  Thank you very much for providing this api tool.

[ironsand]

+1 for the favicon. It's quite nice even if it doesn't work perfectly.
We just need to configure it manually when fetching favicon fails.

[deanishe]

On 11/9/2020 at 10:00 AM, SummerChill said:

The icons of many websites are the root directory followed by "/favicon.ico"

 

Like I said earlier, favicons are no use because they're much too small.