- Mar 18, 2003
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Ok, so for a while I've known about firefox quicksearches. For instance, just type "google foo" in the address bar and you'll go to the google search for "foo". I always wanted to tweak it so that I could just type "g foo" but I didn't think about it long enough to figure it out. Recently, I was poking around in "Manage Bookmarks" and discovered how easy it is :thumbsup:
So, quite possibly many of you know how this works already but I'm sure lots don't, and one of the tricky things about a program like firefox is that you often don't know about a huge number of cool things and you miss out on them. So I thought I'd share how to work with quick searches, for those who didn't know what they were missing.
So, any given bookmark has the "Keyword" field. This, as you may guess, is a shortcut for the link that you can type into the address bar. To try, with the default 1.0.6 install, at least, type in "slang" and you get sent to Urban Dictionary (with a twist).
The twist is the url for the keyword which, in the case of quick searches, includes a "%s". This gets substituted for whatever you type after the keyword. So if you type "slang foo" you'll get the Urban Dictionary definition of "foo". It works with spaces and whatever other crap you want to add.
So as an example, I set up one for google maps. I made a new bookmark (doesn't matter where) with the keyword "gm" and the url "http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s". Now I can open a new tab and type "gm address" instead of going to maps.google.com and then typing in the address and waiting for two page loads.
The nice thing about this is that it's part of your bookmarks so you get it for free when starting a new profile if you take bookmarks with you. One of the bigger pains about firefox, I find, is that it takes a while to tweak every time I start using a new computer and I never end up getting them all the same.
The next one I'm going to try to figure out is the quick search on this forum. I just hope asp.net treats GET and POST the same way...
And for the opera folks, I know you can do something quite similar. Are there any key differences?
So, quite possibly many of you know how this works already but I'm sure lots don't, and one of the tricky things about a program like firefox is that you often don't know about a huge number of cool things and you miss out on them. So I thought I'd share how to work with quick searches, for those who didn't know what they were missing.
So, any given bookmark has the "Keyword" field. This, as you may guess, is a shortcut for the link that you can type into the address bar. To try, with the default 1.0.6 install, at least, type in "slang" and you get sent to Urban Dictionary (with a twist).
The twist is the url for the keyword which, in the case of quick searches, includes a "%s". This gets substituted for whatever you type after the keyword. So if you type "slang foo" you'll get the Urban Dictionary definition of "foo". It works with spaces and whatever other crap you want to add.
So as an example, I set up one for google maps. I made a new bookmark (doesn't matter where) with the keyword "gm" and the url "http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s". Now I can open a new tab and type "gm address" instead of going to maps.google.com and then typing in the address and waiting for two page loads.
The nice thing about this is that it's part of your bookmarks so you get it for free when starting a new profile if you take bookmarks with you. One of the bigger pains about firefox, I find, is that it takes a while to tweak every time I start using a new computer and I never end up getting them all the same.
The next one I'm going to try to figure out is the quick search on this forum. I just hope asp.net treats GET and POST the same way...
And for the opera folks, I know you can do something quite similar. Are there any key differences?
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