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Differences to Serchilo and FindFind.it

Trovu is the official successor of Serchilo / FindFind.it.

If you know FindFind.it, then you almost know how Trovu works. However, a few things are different:

  • Main difference: search queries are not sent out to the server, all processing is done in the client.
    • This means much more privacy.
  • The placeholder syntax changed, from {%query} to <query>.
  • Country namespaces are not 3-letter but 2-letter-codes, prefixed with a dot. So they are much easier to remember, as they (mostly) follow top-level domains. For example:
    • .de is the namespace for Germany (not deu),
    • .plis the namespace for Poland (not pol)
  • There are now also namespaces for dictionaries, making it easy for advanced users set preferred dictionaries.
  • Trovu makes much more use of typed arguments, like city and date. So many Google Maps shortcuts like gmb brandenburger tor (for Berlin) could be replaced with a single gm b,brandenburger tor (where b can be any city abbreviation in Germany)
  • An include functionality was added where shortcuts can share settings with other shortcuts, and where advanced users can easily override keywords for themselves while style benefitting from the curated URL of a shorcut.
  • Instead in a server database, shortcuts are kept in YAML files, in a subdirectory. There, we can stand on Git's shoulders to keep track of shortcut additions and changes. Pull and merge requests are welcome.
  • Once you open Trovu, all shortcuts are loaded into your client and remain cached there, (until you reload). So even if the Trovu server is down, you can keep using Trovu.
  • If you have personal user shortcuts, for Trovu you host them on your GitHub account, or on your web server.

Read more about how migrate from FindFind.it to Trovu.