Request: API to allow passing or linking to a search via URL

[DavidSewell]

Feature Description

Add API functionality to allow searches to be passed to a URL, along the lines of

https://my.manifold.site/search/knowledge

https://my.manifold.site/search/"knowledge unlatched"

Why is this feature important? Who does it help?

Potentially, it would allow end users of a site to construct automated searches for whatever reasons. For a site owner, our specific use case would be to enable creating a hyperlink that would return search results, for example in the context of a blog post about our Manifold instance where we wanted to return a certain set of content matching a search.

Development Notes

I don't know the intricacies of the Manifold search functionality but I'm aware from working on a similar API added to an existing website that it can be very tricky to handle all of the cases of incoming syntax (as well as being sure there are no security holes opened by the API, to injection attacks). So I can understand if implementing this would not be trivial.

[zdavis]

Thank you for taking the time to open this feature request. The Manifold team reviewed this issue during our bi-weekly meeting and the consensus is that this feature makes sense and is in keeping with our overall vision for the platform. Moreover, we see this request as a viable candidate for development under our current available funding. We’re adding an “accepted” label to this request to indicate that it’s within scope and possibly within budget.

The next step is for us to estimate the work involved with this and add it to our feature backlog. Our acceptance of the issue is not a promise that it will be implemented. We will balance this request against the other accepted requests and do our best to implement it within our current available funding.

This was an automated message, but please don't hesitate to reply. Our team watches these issues closely and will respond as soon as we're able to!