[FEATURE] Custom web search engines

[victor-marino]

Describe the feature

It would be great if we could add any custom search engine (and not just Startpage) using normal search strings. Bonus points for search suggestions too.

This search engine should be used in any screen where Lawnchair itself offers an online search option directly to the user. E.g.: when you use the app search option, we could see "Search on Kagi" instead of "Search on Startpage".

Additional tweaks:

• Option to always search the web when pressing enter in the app drawer search
• Option to add 2-3 trailing shortcuts to the search widget

Why would it be useful to add?

Right now, all search options are hardcoded in the app, and there's a tight coupling between offline search, online search and the web browser where the results will be opened. These things should be decoupled whenever possible.

For instance, if one wants to use DuckDuckGo as their search engine, they also have to use their custom app & web browser, and lose the nice-looking local app search of Lawnchair.

Also, there's simply no way to use search engines that don't have an app, such as Kagi. Even choosing Startpage as the search engine means the search bar will no longer have any local search functionality.

At the same time, because there's a huge amount of search engines and everybody has their own preference, it's not realistic to expect the Lawnchair team to keep up and manually integrate every single option. There will always be unsatisfied users.

Did the feature exist in Lawnchair v2? (Play Store version)

No

Example(s)

My proposal would be something like this:

1. Add a new app-wide setting, independent from the search widget settings (as the user may not necessarily be using the Lawnchair widget), that allows you to define your preferred web search engine.
2. The search engine should be defined through regular search strings. Example:

Search: https://kagi.com/search?q=%s
Suggestions: https://kagi.com/api/autosuggest?q=%s

3. From now on, this will be the search engine used anywhere where Lawnchair itself offers a web search option directly to the user, such as the app drawer search (Lawnchair obviously cannot control what is offered inside third party search apps).

Let me know what you think!

Additional context

No response

[squidds]

I really want to switch to Lawnchair from Nova, this is the only thing holding me back. There is no alternative search bar to use, either.