[gNewSense-users] Code KDE4 Google Free (need some help)

[Grammostola Rosea]

Hi,

I'm not an great fan of the Google search engine. Imho it isn't very 
privacy friendly and they are way to powerful on the Internet and how to 
much influence in our 'information society'.

I know the Free Software Foundation has an Free Internet (without being 
tracked) also amongst its values. And also in the Gnewsense wiki I read 
about anonymous web searching.

Since a while I use KDE4. I'm pretty happy with it, but I have one big 
complain. The Google search engine is hard coded in the Kickoff menu (or 
Kicker). I rather like to use another search engine and I want to be 
able to choose my own search engine as user, but more important, I don't 
think it's right to hard code an Internet service of such a powerful 
multinational as Google is.

There is reported a bug here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171316

And I discussed the issue on the kde-devel mailinglist (title: "why 
can't I freely choose my fav search engine in 'kmenu'?"). The are open 
to change, but they say it will not be done in a short time, it's 
absolutely no priority for them, which disappointed me a bit, cause I 
think it is an important issue on principal and philosophic grounds.

So I thought, let's write an message to the guys of GnewSense, maybe 
they will value this issue in the right way and maybe they can help me 
change the code to get some Freedom back and to have an Google Free 
KDE4. I need some help here, cause I'm not an programmer myself...

The KDE devs gave me some hints and they are willing to give assistance 
with building a patch:

> konqueror already has a "Default search engine" setting in the Web 
> Shortcuts
> control panel. krunner uses the webshortcuts as well. so all it would 
> take it
> coordinating this configuration option ... perhaps it could appear in the
> "Default Applications" control panel, with a button there to configure 
> web
> shortcuts (which would just bring up the kcmodule that konqi uses ...)
>
> so ... if you'd like to implement this, here's a possible path:
>
> * add Search Engine to the Default Applications control panel as 
> described
> above
>
> * modify kickoff to use Plasma::RunnerManager for its searches
>
> * create a WebSearch runner plugin that offers to search the web for the
> search term
>
> i'd be happy to answer any questions you'd have about the source code.

I'm looking forward for you replies and I hope you can do something for 
me and all the KDE users who really want to BE FREE, as KDE promises..

Kind regards,

\Rooz