What is the "Search all Tabs" add-on and how can I use it?

After installation, the extension adds a toolbar button to your browser. You can open the popup to search for any content in one of your existing tabs. The extension uses the indexing method to find the most relevant content that matches the user query. Like all search engines, this extension supports most of the search operators like OR and AND.

When the popup gets opened, the extension injects a small JS code into all open tabs to fetch all the text-based contents. Then it passes these contents to the indexing engine. At this point, the extension is ready to perform your search queries over its internal database. When a search has matching entries, these results are populated to the popup with preview and link to the actual content. To easily distinguish each search result, the extension appends the favicon of the tab to the search entry. The matching words are also highlighted in the previewed snippet. When an entry is matched with what you are looking for, click on the title and the extension focuses the relevant tab for you. Also, the content that is shown in the snippet will be selected. You can use the number next to each entry to activate the tab without using your mouse button as well. There are two indexer engines that this extension can use: 1. a CPP library called Xapian (converted to pure JS), 2. a pure JS library called lunrjs. It is a powerful indexing engine that performs indexing and searching on really large databases. It is probably the search engine behind most of your native tools too.

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What's new in this version?

Please check the Logs section.

Why does the extension require indexing each time the popup gets opened?

Because it cares about your browser performance and your privacy. This extension uses a non-persistent background script which basically is unloaded when the popup is closed. Also, the indexed database is stored in your browser memory and get destroyed when the popup is closed to free up the memory. Note that the indexing is blazing fast so there is no need to save the file for later use. Just open the popup and type the searching query. The engine that this extension uses is capable of indexing very large databases.

What is the meaning of the "Search Engine" menu on the right-click context menu of the toolbar button?

As of version 0.2.2, this extension supports searching content with two different engines. The default engine is "xapian" which is a famous C library for content indexing and searching. This extension uses a custom JavaScript-compiled version of this library. This extension also supports searching with "lunrjs" which is a pure JavaScript-based content indexing. You can simply alter the search engine from this context menu, and try the performance of each engine by closing and reopening the popup view. Since the extension reindexes each time the popup is reopened, it is going to use your selected engine. If you intend to use this extension to find partial matches, note that the "xapian" library at present only supports right truncation (e.g. Xap*), however the "lunrjs" supports wildcard at any place. If you are dealing with multilingual content, the "xapian" engine is a better choice.

Can I use this extension to search local text files?

If you have no local tool that supports search operators and keywords, you can use your browser! The extension's indexing engine only works on the browser tabs. If you need to search on local files, drag them to the browser window to let the files get opened in your browser where the extension can read their content. Also note that if you are using a Chromium browser, you will have to allow the extension to have access to the local files in the extension manager (file://). So when the files are opened as browser tabs and the extension has permission to access them, you can open the popup and search within these local files. To limit your search results to local files append URL:file:// to the search query

Can I use any keyword to reduce the number of shown matches?

This extension supports the following keywords. You can use them to extend to reduce the number of matches. To use a keyword, append keyword:query to your query * hostname: the hostname of the document that got indexed (e.g. www.google.com for https://www.google.com) * title: the title of the web page or the title of the document element. If a frame provides its own title, that title gets used instead of the parent's title. * mime: the mime type of the document. For web pages it is text/html. * url: URL of the document. For frames, the URL is invisible to the user, but the extension indexes them too. * date: the last modified date of the document in YYYYMMDD format. * filename: is equal to location.pathname of each URL. * language: the page's language tag. If no tag is provided, "english" is used. See the list of supported languages in the relevant FAQ. To match a particular language use language:english for instance. * keyword: the comma-separated list of keywords that are placed in the meta tag of the document. * description: the meta description tag of the document For instance to search for a book in a google.com tab that contains "physics" keyword in the meta description use: url:google AND keyword:physics. You can use url:google OR keyword:physics to extend your search results to tabs with google in their URL and or "physics" in their meta description.

What are the supported languages?

At this point the extension supports language parsing for "arabic", "armenian", "basque", "catalan", "danish", "dutch", "earlyenglish", "english", "finnish", "french", "german", "german2", "hungarian", "indonesian", "irish", "italian", "kraaij_pohlmann", "lithuanian", "lovins", "nepali", "norwegian", "porter", "portuguese", "romanian", "russian", "spanish", "swedish", "tamil", "turkish".

Note that upon searching a new query, the extension detects the most possible input language of the query and uses that language to parse the query

Why the number of documents that is shown in the popup is more than the number of opened tabs of my browser?

Each frame element inside a page is considered a separate document with its own URL and meta information. Since iframes are frequently used inside web pages, usually the document number is more than the total number of your browser tabs.

Why when I open the popup, the extension already has a query in its search box?

To ease the usage, the extension looks for selected text in the current page and uses it as its initial query.

What is the meaning of the number that is shown on the right side of each search entry?

It is the percentage that this search entry matches with the user's query. 100% means that the query and the search result do have a 100 percent match.

[lunr engine] What are the searching operators that I can use?

As of version 0.2.2, this extension uses lunrjs by default instead of xapian. This library is a pure JS library to provide great search experience without the need for server-side search services. This library supports the following operators:

• WILDCARDS: wildcard is represented as an asterisk (*) and can appear anywhere in a search term. Example: foo*, *oo, or f*o
• FIELDS: By default, this extension will search all fields in a document for the query term, and it is possible to restrict a term to a specific field. Examples: title:foo, or title:foo* bar
• BOOSTS: In searches with multiple terms, a single term may be more important than others. Any document that matches a boosted term will get a higher relevance score, and appear higher up in the results. A boost is applied by appending a caret (^) and then a positive integer to a term. Example: foo^10 bar
• FUZZY MATCHES: This extension supports fuzzy matching search terms in documents, which can be helpful if the spelling of a term is unclear, or to increase the number of search results that are returned. The amount of fuzziness to allow when searching can also be controlled. Fuzziness is applied by appending a tilde (~) and then a positive integer to a term. The following search matches all documents that have a word within 1 edit distance. Examples: foo~1
• TERM PRESENCE: By default this extension combines multiple terms together in a search with a logical OR. To indicate that a term must be present in matching documents the term should be prefixed with a plus (+) and to indicate that a term must be absent the term should be prefixed with a minus (-). Example: +foo bar -baz

[xapian engine] What are the searching operators that I can use?

As of version 0.2.2, this extension uses “lunrjs” by default. If you prefer the more pwerful “xapian” engine, use the right-click over the browser action button to change the engine to “xapian”.

• AND and NOT: will return results that contain both ‘term1’ and ‘term2’.

• XOR (exclusive OR): will return results that contain either ‘term1’ or ‘term2’, but not both.

• OR: will return results that contain either ‘term1’ or ‘term2’.

• Brackets: Change search ordering like term1 AND (term2 OR term3)

• NEAR: will return results where term1 is within 10 words of term2.

• ADJ: will return results where term1 is within 10 words of term2, but in the same order as in the query

• Phrases: According to the Xapian documentation a phrase surrounded with double quotes (like this: “my phrase”) will return results that match everything containing “that exact phrase”

  Note that you can combine search operators with keywords too.

After a few seconds of opening the popup window, the extension automatically searches a query. What is this string and how can I disable this feature?

If you have selected text in the active tab, the extension searches for this text in all open documents when the indexing is over. If you prefer the extension to persist your old query or even does nothing when it is ready, use the right-click context menu item over the toolbar button to change the automatic action.

If I have a discarded tab (a tab that is in hibernate mode), can this extension still search the tab?

If a tab is discarded by a discarding extension like "The Great Suspender" or "Auto Tab Discard" since the content is not accessible, this extension only indexes the title and the URL of the tab. For normal tabs, the content of each frame element also gets indexed. Since there is no matching content for the discarded tabs, when the tab is focused, there is no scrolling to the matching snippet.

Why do I sometimes see a single page listed more than once in the result section?

This extension indexes all frame elements and the content of each frame element is split into smaller sections. If a frame element has more than one matching section, you will see several search results with a single URL in the results section each of them pointing to their section. By selecting each search result, the extension highlights that matching area.

Is it possible to group all matched tabs in a new window?

As of version 0.1.7, you can press Shift + Enter keys on the search box to detach all tabs from their parent windows and group them as a new window. This feature is useful if you have many open tabs and it would be hard to navigator through them. This way you can have all the tabs relevant to your search query in a new window.

I usually use this extension to quickly find a tab by its title. Is there any way to limit the searching scope to the tab titles?

You can prepend the "title:" keyword to the search query or as of version 0.2.0 right-click on the browser action's button and limit the indexing scope to title only. Make sure to remove this limitation when you need to search something inside the page's body

I've loaded this extension on the Firefox sidebar. It seems that the extension does not reindex all tabs when a new tab is added. Is it possible to force reindexing without reopening the sidebar?

When the extension's interface is focused, use Ctrl + R or Command + R to reload the interface of the extension without closing the sidebar.

Can I use this extension to search inside PDF files?

PDF files are protected which means no extension can read the content of PDF tabs. However, as of version 0.2.4, this extension uses the well-known PDF.js library to parse PDF files and include the results into the indexing. Since the extension needs to fetch the PDF binary from the internet, this process makes the indexing a bit slow. If you don't need the extension to fetch and parse PDF files, use the right-click context menu item to disable this feature.

I can use this extension to find all the matching tabs. In my use case, I also want to see the preview of all matching paragraphs for one of these tabs. It is possible?

This extension is designed to find all the matching tabs for your search query and sort the results based on their relevance (same as what Google or DuckDuckGo do for web pages). It is recommended to use this extension to find the most relevant tab and then use Multiple Search and Highlight extension to preview the matched words.

As an alternative, from version 0.2.6, this extension displays a "+" button next to each result. This button performs a deep search on a single frame element by splitting the text of the frame into small segments and considers each segment as a new document. This way you can see the snippets for different segments of a single tab too.

Can I adjust the snippet size that is shown for each search result?

Right-click on the browser's action button and find Options -> Snippet Size -> #n words

Can I adjust the number of results that are returned when I search for a query?

Right-click on the browser's action button and find Options -> Search Size -> #n results

I have too many open tabs in different browser windows, and I would like this extension to only search among tabs in the current window. Is it possible to limit the indexing to the current window?

Right-click on the action button and find the "Search Crawler" menu. Change the type to "Only index current window". Note that limiting the number of tabs to index also improves the indexing performance.