Our homegrown CyberSearch Firefox extension has hit a big milestone last week as it passed the 50,000 download mark! I never expected the extension to be that well received, but I’m happy to see that so many users are finding it to be useful.
On average it looks like there are about 10,000 users running our extension each day, and at its peak there were about 13,200 users. If you’re interested in more stats they are all publicly available here.
So what’s next with CyberSearch? As of right now I don’t have any plans on adding new functionality, but one of the most requested features is to add support for other search engines like Yahoo. I would really like to do that, but the last time I looked at Yahoo’s search API it wasn’t quite as elaborate as what Google offers. So it would probably take a significant amount of work to make it work the way I’d want it to.
The main thing I’m focusing on right now is making sure the extension remains compatible with pre-release versions of Firefox 3.5, because as a Beta tester myself I know it can get frustrating when an extension stops working. I’m not using nightly builds right now though, so if you see a bug in a nightly release please shoot me an email so that I can look into whether it’s something I need to resolve.
We’ve updated the extension so that Firefox 3.5 testers should be able to install CyberSearch without needing to force the compatibility, which is something I’ve received several requests for. So if you’re using the extension I hope you’re enjoying it, and as always feel free to submit your feedback.
I’m surprised it’s not more popular. I’ve got about 25 extensions and cyberSearch is one of my top 5 (the others being Xmarks, Tab Mix Plus, All-in-One Sidebar, and DownThemAll!).
Congratualation CyberSearch! But I think Peers is a little bit better, has more features and supports Yahoo. You can use the most Searchengines without inconvenient configuration. See it at Mozilla’s recommendations or [peersbros.com]
Well, Firefox extensions really only become popular via word of mouth. You also have to be a pretty big geek to get into using something like this I think.
It definitely has some features that CyberSearch doesn’t have, but I also don’t think it integrates with all of Google’s search services like CyberSearch does. I wanted to give people the ability to do a blog search, a news search, a maps search, and really any type of Google search that they wanted to do. That’s also the reason I haven’t added support for Yahoo because their API isn’t as extensive as Google’s, and so it wouldn’t have all the various features.