Hi all,
I'm Rob Maehl, the developer of WhyNotWin11, MSEdgeRedirect, and a few other Windows apps. I'm currently in the process of adding @marsara9@lemmy.world's Search-Lemmy to MSEdgeRedirect which will allow you to search Lemmy directly from the Windows Start Menu. I had originally planned to add this feature for Reddit but we all know how that site ended up.
Currently, this feature is in the developer builds on my github. However, this feature won't be in the stable builds for a couple weeks. This is because the "preferred_instance" parameter is currently required in the URL, and I don't want to be yet another developer treating Lemmy.world as if it's the main instance. This should be fixed later on as the site will pull from a user cookie if this URL parameter is missing.
Hope y'all enjoy!
So any time I use the bar to pull up an app on my system, I can ALSO be helping to overload my preferred Lemmy instances API, at no extra cost to me?
Nope. The search results within the Start Menu itself are still Bing (although various devs are still looking into correcting this). Only when you choose the "see web results" option will it send it to Search-Lemmy (and eventually your favorite Instance via crawling).
Ok thank god lol. Nice work!