Russell Beattie

I wanted to put together this quick tour on how to use Opera Mini's ability to add custom Searches to its start page to enable you to navigate and search using Mowser in just a couple clicks. You probably never noticed, but Mowser actually implements the OpenSearch XML spec, and can be added to your FireFox or IE search box in the top right of your browser just by navigating to the home page and clicking on the (lightly glowing) down arrow in the search engine area in your browser. Opera mini has a similar feature, but enabled for any search form box.

Here's how to use this feature with Mowser, if you want to try it for yourself, you can try it online using the Opera Mini online emulator.

First thing is to go the start page of Opera Mini (shown at the left) and enter in www.mowser.com, which will bring you to the Mowser home page.

You need to click down until the search/address form is highlighted, and then click to activate it to type text. If you don't actually go in to that text field, then you won't get the menu you need to create a search

Click on the left or right soft button (depends on your phone) which is marked Menu, and you'll see the following option to "Create Search..." This is where you can add in

Opera mini will fill in the title and automatically enter in the search parameters in the URL. Those of you familiar with Firefox's bookmark 'keywords' will recognize the %s style parameter matching string. Mowser's default title is a bit long, so use the edit box to cut it down a bit.

Once you've saved, you'll see Mowser at the bottom of the list of Search Engines, clicking back will bring you back to the Mowser home page. This is also the menu you'll see when you click on the Search drop down from the Opera Mini start page - to activate it simply click on the name of the search engine you want to use (in this case Mowser). You can also edit/delete it with the menu at the bottom of the screen.

When you go back to the Opera Mini start page, you'll see that your last chosen search engine is highlighted. Next time you want to search the web with thumbnails, or navigate directly to a mobilized version of a site, simply scroll to the search drop down box, choose Mowser, and enter in your search, or something that looks like a URL (in other words, if it ends in .com or .net or any of the other common URLs, you don't need to enter in "http://").

Opera Mini rocks, of course, and does a great job of adapting pages by itself. But there are many times when you might want to see a predictably mobilized version of a site that Mowser provides, or simply use the Mowser Search as well.

Hope that all made sense!

-Russ