App to Redirect URL on Browsers

by Rian

The prevalence of web UIs with advanced DB features on them make it possible to save search queries on bookmarks. For example, I could keep track of a favorite author on a eBook platform with a url similar to service.ddns.org:port/search?=authorname. Each platforms have their own URL scheme, but the point is simple. This approach would effectively serve as “smart playlist” available on iTunes or Apple Music, if set up correctly. That is, if all platforms are willing to play ball.

Some of the platforms use brackets [] in its URL query, and it often confuses the heck out of the browsers. On Firefox, it has been my experience that either the browser fails to encode the brackets when opening the bookmark, or saves the URL with the raw strings into the bookmark. Redirector, an open-source browser extension freely available for Firefox and Chrome, can solve this by rerouting the search query. It supports wildcard and regular expression.

Here’s an example. On some of these platforms, this is how their URL query looks like after its URL: series?writer[0]=item1. For the life of me, I do not understand why the developer chose to use brackets, — perhaps it was expecting a list value — but the brackets are the problem. On my setup, I have Redirector set to series?writer%5B0%5D=, where [0] is URL encoded to %5B0%5D. It’s consistently displaying the saved search result from the address bar and from the bookmark.

I suppose there could be other methods of using Redirector. One I did think of was using it with DuckDuckGo. I could anonymize my Google query using DDG’s Google syntax. I didn’t actually go through with the setup, as I wanted to separate out the anonymous search platform and personalized one more visually. Sky is quite the limit with this one.