Now you can select what search engines to search

Today (well yesterday actually) I added a function so that our users themselves can decide what search-engines they do want to use when searching with Agent55 by simply clicking a checkbox. If you want to try this feature out the go to the Engines page and select what engines you want to use.

This combined with the one click Javascript search button will make a great team! :)

Happy searching!

New search button. Search over 200 engines with a click

Today I have added the possibility for users to add an "Agent55 search button" to their browser.

When added, users can search the whole Agent55 wide range of search-engines, by just clicking the search button. Included are some also smart "short cuts" that makes searching even easier for the Agent55 users.

The searchbutton is written in javascript and works for InternetExplorer 6 & 7, Firefox 2 and Opera 9 - So just go to http://agent55.com/?p=addsb and add the searchbutton to your browser and experience the simpleness of searching them all.

(Users of IE7 and Firefox can also install the Agent55 search as an search provider/Open Search engine should they want to.)

"News/Log" added

Yesterday I added a function on the startpage (http://agent55.com) that shows what has happened in the search-engine database a specifik day. It shows: new categories added, new search engines that has been added and what search engines that has been removed (and the reason why it was removed, eg. "uses popups", "spyware" etc.)

It can really show you what is going on at Agent55.

More features will be added shortly...

Does Firefox crash for you?

About ten days ago I discovered a really evil and nasty bug that totally crashed the Mozilla Firefox webbrowser and after some hard work I managed to remove the crashing symptom of my site.

On popular demand I have restored an old backup where the Firefox-crashing bug still is present and set up a little test site for you all to test if your Firefox (combined with your Windows-version) crashes. It seems that the only variable is not what Firefox version you are running, but also there seems to depend on something else, it may be a windows driver or something like that. Maybe it depends on what Add-ons are installed in Firefox.

If you are running Firefox go to http://ffcrash.agent55.com and test it, and please post a comment about the results here. Dont forget to mention what version of Firefox you have and what operating system version you are running.

Weird bug crashes Firefox totally without warning

This site uses a lot of DHTML-objects and the purpose was to make this work for IE 6/7, Firefox and Opera with the priority in that order. After months of coding and testing, I felt that this site was pretty stable, and so I asked my friends to help me test this site out.

After 2 hours I got a text message at my MSN messenger where a friend claims that my site makes his Firefox (2.01) to totaly Crash! No error message, no nothing, it just crashes and closes all Firefox windows opened. I ask what he did to make this crash and he says "I just clicked on the Find!-button twice". OMG! I immediately start trying to reproduce this bug, and find out that my Firefox also crashes, sometimes. Not every time I click the Find!-button, but every other time approximately.

Now I was forced to start dividing up my code in pieces and start commenting out code, to narrow down the bug, and as you can imagine my Firefox crashed many many many times that day and the day after.

Eventually I narrowed the bug down and found out that it was something in my main .css-file that caused Firefox to unexpectedly crash! At the end I finaly found what was causing Firefox to crash. It was a CSS-class that had "position: absolute" as an attribute and this class was used by the many DHTML objects used in my code.

I guess this error is some kind of buffer-overflow bug thats causing FF to die. So to solve this problem I had to change the actual CSS-class from absolute to static, and then later on in javascript-code, I could change the position to be absolute. And FINALY, Firefox did not crash so horribly that it had done before. So bevare developers if you experience this Firefox crash bug, try commenting out your (extensive) style-sheet.

If you have Firefox and want to test if your Firefox crashes, go here

New Layout

Almost from the very beginning of beta-testing Agent55 out beta-testers (close friends and colleagues of mine) pointed out to me that the design of Agent55 was not the best, to say it gently. I have now tried to change that and made a more "clean" layout of Agent55, trying to emphasize the "agent-feeling". What that now may be :)

So, today (only 4 days after launch) we will release the new layout of Agent55. Hope you like it as it is more clean and hopefully has a better layout than the last one...

Agent55 just launched

Hey hey, my first blog ever, so please bear with me.. :)

My name is Goran Johansson, I run a small company in Sweden called Awesume Interactive and the 17th of Janaury 2007 we released a site that we have been working on for about 2-3 months.

The site is called agent55 (agent55.com) and is a so called meta search engine, that means that it has no own search engine, but sends out requests to other search engines on the web and shows the results in two different views. Hard to explain, easier to try out. We have added about 15 different search-categories and more will be added with time. The categories at launch was: The Web, Images, Videos, Mp3/Audio, Shopping, Photos, Directories, Software, Subtitles and Bit-torrents. We also have a localized version of agent55 that is called Agent55 Sweden that searches only local swedish sites, such as best price, jobs, news, phone numbers etc.

I have put down quite a lot of work to make this site tick with all of the three big browsers, namely: Internet Explorer(6 & 7), Firefox(2+), Opera (9) and as any webdeveloper know DHTML together with the three musketeers (?) is a great hassle...

My thoughts with this blog is to inform you a little about the background of this site (and me) and also what is happening and what is gonna happen at the site, I can promise you that I have a lot of ideas for this site if it turns out well...

If you want you can visit the site, try it out a bit and give me your reactions.

Enough for now, More will come soon.

Best regards

Goran Johansson