Go to the address bar and type hgk.us/ followed by whatever you're looking for. We'll help you look.
Designed for when you know what you're looking for but deciding up front where to look would interrupt your train of thought. Also handy when you're using somebody else's computer and can't get to your bookmarks.
It's this simple: Go to your address bar and type hgk.us/ followed by whatever you'd like to look up. You'll be presented with several options for search engines. Try, for example, hgk.us/apple.
If you already know which engine you want to use, hgk.us can help you with that as well. For example, you can use hgk.us/google The Beatles to search for the Fab Four on Google, or hgk.us/dict flagrant to look up the "conspicuously offensive" word on Merriam-Webster Online. View the complete list of magic words here.
Using a magic word followed by / at the beginning of your query will show you hgk's guess at what you'd like to search, then link you there. If you don't want to go where it guessed, hit reload on your browser or click the stop button to view more options.
To prevent guessing altogether, prefix your query with a space: hgk.us/google/maps will help you search for the term "maps" on Google, but hgk.us/ google/maps (with a space before the first word) will allow you to select an engine for searching for the term "google/maps".
When the different search options are displayed, you can use the ranking buttons beside your results to reorder the services that appear for a specific magic word (or for no magic word). The top-ranked service is the one that will be displayed by default. This is implemented in cookies, so anything you set is limited to the browser you're currently using (it does not apply across browsers or devices).
%7F) in my address bar!Nothing's wrong, I promise!
The rewriter is designed to be able to accept just about anything you could possibly type after the initial hgk.us/, subject to the limitations of the browser and of URIs in general (for example, % is the beginning of an escape sequence, and #, which normally doesn't get sent to a webserver, is only supported by means of a JavaScript hack).
In the process of making the query space so broad, I clobbered just about any place I might be able to put the site's own assets (such as images, scripts, and styles). So after some consideration, I attempted to find some sequence of characters that would be astronomically unlikely to type accidentally. It would have to be limited to the initial ASCII set since the interpretation of octets above that is not completely standardized.
I settled on the last character in the range, U+7F 'DELETE'. It is a control character, meaning that its original intended purpose was to do something rather than say something. In older computing machinery, this is the character that would result from pressing Backspace, and in some contexts it can still be displayed that way. In a URI, it can't even be represented directly (its escape %7F is substituted). Some browsers such as Firefox attempt to make URIs more friendly by unescaping the URI (turning %20s into spaces, for example) when displaying; in this case, a missing character glyph (a box) is displayed instead.
This service was started before it was common for an address bar to do something sane when faced with a non-address, and at a time when built-in search boxes hadn't yet caught on (though Google's toolbar and its less desirable copycats were popular) and neither had friendly URLs (there was less example.org/foo/fiz buz and more example.org/foo.php?q=fiz+buz). IE6 was still very much the norm, and I was frequently in situations where I had to work on others' machines, out of date and Firefoxless as they tended to be, and always without my bookmarks.
The rewriter was initiated as a workaround to these problems. It can be used without installing any browser add-ons, it's brief to type (and thus less painful to use), and whenever it happens to be necessary, it provides a friendly, somewhat permalinkable facade over unfriendly URLs, which was of some value when sites like Merriam-Webster changed from one unfriendly pattern to another (before finally settling on its current, relatively friendly variation).
Naturally, a lot of that has been fixed, and so this service is superfluous in places. If what you want is delivered without fail by Google, this query rewriter won't add much to your experience. This service used to do substantially better with site-specific search engines, but Google itself has vastly improved there as well, if you add some additional information to the query. For example, hgk.us/george and a Google search for name george both provide the expected link to Behind the Name. And that's very much as it should be.
But I still frequently use this service as an aid to my train of thought: I can enter a search term immediately and save the decision of where to look until after you've typed it. If somehow that isn't always Google, this service is still of some use. I invite you to give it a try and see if you like it.