Never use Firefox Search Engines Again
I realized recently that by mastering what’s called Firefox Bookmark Keyword you can ignore something called Search Engine Plugin. The idea is very simply. Bookmark any search page, name your desired keyword, then start searching using the format below in your address bar:
<selected-keyword> query
Let’s see it in practice now shall we?
1) Right click on the desired search box field and select “Add a Keyword for this search…”.
2) Specify the name you want for this bookmark, and the associated keyword you want to use. Make it something short and descriptive. For instance BAA is Blog All Along Initials. Click OK when you finish.
3) In the address bar of your Firefox browser type: “<selected keyword> <query>” and hit enter. Example if you have followed this practice literally is: “baa Firefox”. Put it in your address bar and click Enter.
VIOLA! If you see the Firefox results from BlogAllAlong then you are there. Never care about search engine plugins again. Below is a list of keywords I find useful:
- Google: Keyword G
- Google Images: Keyword IMG
- Google News: Keyword NEWS
- Google Bookmarks: Keyword BOOKMARKS
- YouTube: Keyword UT
- Q8Ba7th Search: Keyword Q8
- IMDB: Keyword IMDB
- DailyGizmos: Keyword DG
* NOTE: Keyword is case in-sensitive here.
Ofcourse you would chose your favorite News and Image search source. It can be Yahoo for instance. Trying with Live Image Search however didn’t work. This is due to the way of implementation. It seems to be setting some variables dynamically at a certain point. So if you are Live Search user, yes you would still need the old fashioned Search Engine Plugin. But how many Firefox users are really Live users I wonder?
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Comments
You could if you only use a handful of plugins, or if you will have problems memorizing the keywords. This solution is more suitable to the people who are used to keyboard and shortcuts. If you use too many search plugins, the long drop down list will not be friendly at all as well.
Let’s look at it from the number of clicks. Say we have 5 search plugins. If most of the time you will use the first search plugin, then memorizing a keyword for that search plugin would be almost the same. If we say you use all plugins randomly, then that comes to using 3rd plugin in the list on average.
Plugin:
1- Click on Drop Down List of search plugins Or Ctrl+E
2- Move to third plugin with mouse Or twice Ctrl+Dwn key
3- Search query and Enter
Keyword:
1- Ctrl+L (since most keyword users are shortcut users) or mouse over address bar
2-
Go beyond the 5 plugins and use them randomly, you will see that mastering keywords is much much faster you will forget about plugins.
I posted about this cool firefox feature on my old blog, but back then, you couldn’t right-click on search fields; it was done manually.
I only saw it say six months before, and didn’t care to try it. I then forgot what the feature is called and couldn’t find it until maybe 2 months back :)
[...] Using Google Chrome makes me feel like I just upgraded my DSL connection. Doing my regular heavy day use on various sites, I can’t recall any issue so far regarding site support. Also, as I imported the Firefox bookmark, I realized Google Chrome takes an extra mile in identifying your Bookmark Keywords. [...]
Nifty, thanks for sharing.