Feature Request - Search Functionality across the Web API Docs

As someone who frequently uses the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” Firefox functionality to search from the URL bar, I wish there was a way to do this with Mozilla’s Web API docs. I normally just google search and look for the MDN links, but I have to sift through W3Schools, tutorials and other random articles I’m not interested in, I’d prefer to just search across MDN Web API docs. Currently, there is the general Mozilla search bar on the Mozilla website that produces search results across the entire Mozilla website. Using this search puts a lot of noise in the search results that makes it even worse than just using Google Search. Essentially, I would love it if there was a way to reproduce the experience when searching across https://caniuse.com, which shows API results in an easily understandable way. ie: https://caniuse.com/#search=background This search coupled with the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” functionality makes quickly checking the status of an API extremely quick and easy.

Let me know if this functionality already exists and I just missed it or your thoughts on something like this.

Hi @Chris_Hayes!

Thanks for sending in your thoughts here. Unfortunately the search functionality on MDN Web Docs is not the greatest. We’ve thought about it many times, but we always seem to end up having something more pressing for the developer team to work on.

It is not seen as a critical problem because most people get round the noise in search engine results in the following ways:

  1. they include the word “mdn” along with the feature they are searching for in their search, e.g. “mdn”. Compare for example a search for “geolocation” with a search for “mdn geolocation” in your favourite search engine.

  2. Use an extension like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-w3schools/ to hide W3Schools results from your searches.

Thanks for the reply, yeah just adding mdn to the search query is probably the easiest way to clean up the search results. I understand it not being the highest priority. I didn’t know there was an extensions for removing W3Schools lol, for whatever reason I didn’t see that extension in my searches and ended up writing a ViolentMonkey script to remove results by URL.

Nice! I’d not heard of ViolentMonkey, but it looks pretty useful.

Yeah it’s great for the odd script you want running on specific websites. It’s basically the same as the more-popular GreaseMonkey and TamperMonkey.

FYI if anyone comes across this thread and is looking for an alternative, I ended up making a Firefox keyword search for Google that included “site:developer.mozilla.org” to show only MDN links and then combined that with the “I’m Feeling Lucky” to go to open the first result. This is the bookmark link for that: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:developer.mozilla.org&btnI removing “&btnl” has it search normally without the “I’m Feeling Looking” part. Worked well enough, searching “mdn clone node” brought me directly to the MDN Node.cloneNode() page, which was cool. However, Google warns you when you leave Google, so had to use a this script to auto click-through that page: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/390770-workaround-for-google-i-m-feeling-lucky-redirect