Web-lookups allow you to execute web queries based on text selected in the source or target window. For instance if you see a word in the source text that you would like to search for in Wikipedia, before web lookups you would have copied and pasted the text. With web lookups, select the text, right click, and then select the web lookup.
Virtaal comes with Google, Wikipedia and Wiktionary enabled, and Bing and Yahoo disabled. The Web Look-ups dialog can enable or disable these built-in look-ups but not remove them, and Virtaal keeps their names and URLs up to date. Look-ups you add yourself can be removed. Each needs its own name, and names starting with “virtaal-” are reserved.
Below are user contributed web-lookup queries that you can add to Virtaal. If you have others that you think could be useful then please add them to the list.
You can also create your own web-lookups.
These are not bound to any language and deal specifically with lookups performed against search engines.
Use Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
quote: yes
https://www.bing.com/search?q=%(query)s
Use the Google search engine.
quote: yes
https://www.google.com/search?q=%(query)s
Use the Yahoo search engine.
quote: yes
https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%(query)s
Various dictionaries for a single language, multiple languages or specialist domain dictionaries. Not limited to English dictionaries.
language: various
quote: no
https://%(querylang)s.wiktionary.org/wiki/%(query)s
quote: no
https://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=%(query)s
quote: no
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/%(query)s
language: English
quote: no
https://www.yourdictionary.com/%(query)s
language: various
quote: no
https://translate.google.com/?sl=%(querylang)s&tl=%(nonquerylang)s&text=%(query)s
These are not bound to any language, such as where language is not important, or will work in almost any source or target language, such as Wikipedia where the query will ask the correct language version of Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia encyclopaedia, queried in the language of the selected text.
quote: no
https://%(querylang)s.wikipedia.org/wiki/%(query)s
quote: no
https://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=%(query)s&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o7=&o5=&o1=1&o6=&o4=&o3=&h=
quote: no
https://btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2alpha/alpha-eng.html?lang=eng&i=1&srchtxt=%(query)s&index=ent&go=Find
termic searches Microsoft’s terminology and translation memories.
language: various
quote: no
termic needs a language code with a country, such as fr_fr, which Virtaal
doesn’t provide, so write the target language into the URL yourself. English
to French:
https://termic.me/?q=%(query)s&sl=en_us&tl=fr_fr
Similarly use pt_br for Brazilian Portuguese, de_de for German, and so
on - termic’s language menu lists the rest.
These queries are only relevant to one language, such as a monolingual dictionary, or only a few languages such as a terminology list that covers a single pair or limited pairs of languages.
You need to know the following information:
display_name: The name that will be shown in the context menu
url: The actual URL that will be queried. See below for template variables.
quoted: Whether or not the query string should be put in quotes (“).
Valid template variables in ‘url’ fields are:
%(query)s: The selected text that makes up the look-up query.
%(querylang)s: The language of the query string (one of %(srclang)s or %(tgtlang)s).
%(nonquerylang)s: The source- or target language which is not the language that the query (selected text) is in.
%(srclang)s: The currently selected source language.
%(tgtlang)s: The currently selected target language.