One smart guy Justin Schwalbe was recently “hit by an inspiration“. He has managed to swap out the default google.com website address for yubnub.com instead. This is how he explain the idea of this hack:

I was just sitting in class, (sorta bored) and read over Erica’s post over at tuaw, and thought.. well why only google and yahoo? We should be able to use whatever search engine we want.

So I opened up the MobileSafari binary (contained within /Applications/MobileSafari.app) with vi and did a string search for “search.google.com”. I was able to edit that entire URL to encode for a yubnub search. If you haven’t heard of yubnub, it’s cool, trust me.

At first it didn’t work–Safari crashed when I opened it. Oops. Then I realized that in order to change a binary file like that you need to keep the original number of characters constant. “http://search.google.com/search?q=%@&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8” (47 chars) is the original string for searching google; whereas “http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=%@” (less than 47 chars) is yubnubs. The trick is to “pad” the yubnub search string with a few extra useless characters like so:

“http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=%@&xxxxxxxxxxxx” (now it has 47, aaah). And there you have it! I don’t often use yubnub, but it seems to default to google search. Otherwise you could do a search for “wiki embryology” and it would pull up a wikipedia page for embryology. Very convenient!!

Very interesting hack, now every iPhone’s owner could use his own favorite search engine. The main problem is where you will get a binary editor that fits in your pocket…

Advertisement

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...