A big influence on me was the hacker culture on AOL. This was around the time AOL 2.6 or 2.7 was current, and there were many ways to modify the AOL software to do very cool things.
After AOL released version 3 of the AOL client (which closed a lot of the hooks for illegal addons), I wrote what might be the world's first searchbox for web browsers. This was when I was a teenager and AltaVista was still the largest search engine. The program I wrote was a small AppleScript application that registered an "av" protocol with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer so you could type "av:knitting patterns" in the Location bar and have that string sent to the AppleScript applet. The script received the string, looked for what came after the "av:" and computed a full URL to send it back to the web browser. The whole process was invisible to the user, as long as the AppleScript applet was running in the background.
It was a very simple script and I released it as shareware. I later built a search plugin architecture so users could add their favorite search engines, and the whole experience was a huge lesson in programming, testing, documentation, distribution, customer support and marketing, and I was suddenly buried in work.
Then Apple developed a plugin architecture for Sherlock and I started getting fewer and fewer shareware registrations. That's what essentially killed my shareware product, but the entire experience was very exciting. I was hooked and have been hacking ever since.
It's interesting that the style of searching you're talking about has remanifested 12 years later in the form of Firefox 3's smart bookmarks. http://ptaff.ca/smart/
What was the name of your program? Does it still work?
