The Search slide-out is a web search that sits on the right-hand strip beside the work you're doing. Type some words, press Enter, and the results are there; click a result and the page opens in the View, in the middle of the screen, while the results stay where they were, ready for the next one. It isn't married to any one search engine: you choose which, and each engine is nothing more than a web shortcut in a folder of yours, so you can add your own.

Using It

Search is one of the tabs on the right-hand strip, after the Jukebox. Like the others it comes out when you click its tab and goes away when you click it again, and it can be put away from the list of Side Tabs. It keeps itself at least 360 pixels wide while it is open, because an engine's results are a ribbon in anything narrower. The browser inside it isn't started until the first time you open the panel, so having the tab costs nothing until you use it.

Along the top are Back and Ahead, the name of the search engine in use (a drop-down that lists the others), and the box for your words. Type and press Enter. Choose another engine in the drop-down and the same words are searched on that one, which makes it quick to ask two engines the same question. The page below is the engine's own, untouched, and it shares its browser with the Views, so a setting or a sign-in made in one is there in the other.

An engine that is only a page, with no place for words in its address, can't be searched from the box; the box is grayed, its tip says so, and you search in the engine's own page instead. With no engines at all, the panel says so and points to Settings > Search.

Where the Results Open

This is the point of having Search here at all: when you click a link that leaves the search, the page opens in the View of the desktop you're on, as a web page like any other, with its own Back and Ahead. The slide-out stays open and stays on the results, so the next one is a click away. What stays in the slide-out is the search itself: the engine's own next page of results, its Images or News, its filters, and whatever the page does by itself, such as a consent page or a robot check, since you didn't click those and a consent page opening in the View would be a mystery.

Search engines send most clicks through an address of their own, to count them. Where Desktop Minder knows the pattern it opens the page behind it, so that the View's tab has the real page's title and its history doesn't begin with the engine's hop. Where it doesn't, the click still goes to the View, which follows the redirect itself.

A link that isn't a web page at all, such as a mailto: address or a magnet: link, is not opened, and the strip at the foot says so.

A Page for a Phone

The slide-out is tall and narrow, which is exactly what an engine's page for phones is built for, and an engine decides which page to send by who the browser says it is. So this one browser tells engines it is Chrome on an Android phone, and Google and the others give it their phone layout. That is true of the slide-out alone: the Views keep the browser's own name, so a result opened in the View is the engine's ordinary page.

The Search Engines

Each engine is a web shortcut, an .url file, in a folder called Search Engines in your home folder. The file's name is the engine's name, and its address has {searchTerms} in it where your words go. (%s, which browsers use, is understood too.) Desktop Minder comes with seven:

• Brave Search, which is the one in use until you choose another
• Google
• Bing
• Startpage
• Ecosia
• Yahoo
• Wikipedia, which searches Wikipedia's own articles

These are written into the folder the first time they are needed, and never again on their own. So an engine you delete stays deleted, and one you edit keeps your edit. To get them back there's Restore Starters.

Choosing and Adding Them

The Search section of the Desktop Minder Settings page lists the engines, each with its name and web address. Click one and it is the engine the Search tab uses, at once; the drop-down on the tab and the list on the Settings page always agree. Under the list are four buttons:

• New... asks for a name and a web address, which must have {searchTerms} in it, and says in a line of its own what is wrong until it is right.
• Delete asks first, then puts the chosen engine's file in the Recycle Bin.
• Open Folder opens the Search Engines folder in the View.
• Restore Starters puts back the engines Desktop Minder came with that aren't in the folder.

Because an engine is only a file, you can also add one from Explorer: find the search address of the site you want, put {searchTerms} where the words would be, and save it as an .url file in the folder. The folder is in your home folder, so if that is in OneDrive your engines are on your other computer too.

Not Yet

• A key to jump to the Search tab with the words already in it, and a right-click Search for on selected text.
• A guarantee for every engine. How an engine lays out its result pages, and the addresses of its tracking hops, are the engine's to change, and Desktop Minder follows them as of today. When one changes, results still open in the View; they just may take one extra hop to get there.