Smart keywords
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | Tech
One feature of Firefox I’ve just found about is smart keywords. If you hadn’t heard about them easier it is basically a way to run searches on any site you like from the address bar.
Basically, you go to a website you want to be able to search without visiting, select the search form and select add a keyword for this search. For example, on Amazon (I’m using Amazon because the stock example is IMDb and I wanted to do something different :p), you could enter “amazon” and then to search via your address bar you would just type amazon digital cameras and it would bring up said page.
A lot of obvious sites to do this with are already in the quick search bar on Firefox but I don’t find I ever use this even when I’m searching these sites because you have to change it away from Google before you search and then change it back to Google after you’re done and in the time you have done that you could have just typed in the URL of the site, especially given that can be done via keyboard shortcuts and if there is one for selecting a different quick search engine, I don’t know it and can’t imagine it would actually be much of a shortcut if it does exist.
While I don’t think it’s particularly useful to be able to search Amazon or IMDb this way as I don’t actually visit them that much, the more I got thinking about it the more I started thinking of sites that it would be useful for. Notably, Wikipedia, Mininova and eBay – all of which I go to one of my recently visited pages at on that site just so I can get to the search bar. I mean, who ever really wants to look at the Wikipedia homepage? I’m guessing it will also work with the search on Facebook too.
One feature of Firefox I’ve just found about is smart keywords. If you hadn’t heard about them easier it is basically a way to run searches on any site you like from the address bar.
Basically, you go to a website you want to be able to search without visiting, select the search form and select add a keyword for this search. For example, on Amazon (I’m using Amazon because the stock example is IMDb and I wanted to do something different :p), you could enter “amazon” and then to search via your address bar you would just type amazon digital cameras and it would bring up said page.
A lot of obvious sites to do this with are already in the quick search bar on Firefox but I don’t find I ever use this even when I’m searching these sites because you have to change it away from Google before you search and then change it back to Google after you’re done and in the time you have done that you could have just typed in the URL of the site, especially given that can be done via keyboard shortcuts and if there is one for selecting a different quick search engine, I don’t know it and can’t imagine it would actually be much of a shortcut if it does exist.
While I don’t think it’s particularly useful to be able to search Amazon or IMDb this way as I don’t actually visit them that much, the more I got thinking about it the more I started thinking of sites that it would be useful for. Notably, Wikipedia, Mininova and eBay – all of which I go to one of my recently visited pages at on that site just so I can get to the search bar. I mean, who ever really wants to look at the Wikipedia homepage? I’m guessing it will also work with the search on Facebook too.