deepthoughts.orsomethinglikethat

...and aloha Google (kind of).

"Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine" and I'm making the switch. Using Mahalo is easy, but switching from Google (is the link even necessary?) is not. It's not that Mahalo's search results are sub-par... they're actually better... when there is a hand-written result page. Even when there isn't a Mahalo authored result page, the site returns Google's results. It's really a win-win for the user. The hard part, is breaking the habit of typing "www.google.com" when I need to find something. Oh... and when I do remember to go straight to the Mahalo home page... I kind of miss the simplicity of classic Google.

To combat my Google habit, I've created a nice little, simple, ugly, but functional Greasemonkey script called google2mahalo. The script forwards search requests from Google.com on to Mahalo to ensure a Google habit doesn't prevent getting the best search results available.

Go on... TRY IT... there's nothing to lose...

I know... I'm very late on all of this. Greasemonkey isn't new and neither is using Google Translate as a proxy/tunnel. Heck, there's probably already a Greasemonkey script that combines the two! Nonetheless, Greasemonkey is new to me and I decided to write this for fun even though I'm not sitting behind a corporate proxy myself.

Google Proxy will add two "User Script Commands" to your FireFox Tools->Greasemonkey->User Script Commands... menu:

1. Google Proxy - Prompt URL - This command will prompt you for a URL to navigate to via Google Translate.
2. Google Proxy - This Page's Links - This command will convert all of the links on the page to navigate to the original destination via Google Translate.

It's important to note that when Google Translate navigates to a URL, it also automatically converts all of the links on the translated page.

Special thanks to Jim Wilson for sparking my interest in Greasemonkey and sharing his Yoda ways with JavaScript.