Okay, I am liking this keyword search option in Firefox so much that I had to write a post about it. Yeah, a post after 5 months. Anyway, straight to the topic, most of the times, I use Google to search things. And, I am not used to using the search bar for this. So, I used to go to the Google.com home page and then type in the query. Now, I already said through other mediums that, I am not great fan of this Google instant. May be it's good for the people whose typing speed is little slow. I don't use it much. Google Suggest was more than enough and instant is just an eye candy. There was no need to move the search results below the text box all the time and divert my attention. So yeah, I never used it much. Another reason was, I was hooked to
this keyword search feature in Firefox. This link explains the thing in detail. I would just give couple of examples of the same.
The thing is pretty easy to start with. You can just right click on the search box of any site and you will find the "Add a keyword for this search..." option in the context menu.
Select that. And select a keyword which you want to associate with this particular search e.g. Google. But 'Google' is pretty long word to type to search on Google, so why not just 'g'. Okay, so from next time, whenever you have to search on Google, you can just enter 'g
QUERY' in the awesome bar of your Firefox. Well, I know that, you would not be pretty excited with another option to do Google search. But, this comes handy for any searching any other resources for which you can't use Google search. e.g. your company's internal code browser. So, you can assign another character to the that search like 'c' for code and write your query in the address bar! I found one more use for this recently. Whenever I wanted to see the definition of any word, I used to type 'tfd.com/the_word'
(tfd.com is the short URL for thefreedictionary.com). But, then I assigned 't' as the keyword for tfd's search and now I just type 't the_word
'. Similarly, I use 'ud' as the keyword for urbandictionary.com and so on.
There's another amazing feature of Firefox, using which, it takes to the first result of the search, if you type the query in the browser. e.g. if I type 'blowin' in the wind lyrics', or 'imdb the big bang theory' it would not take me to the respective search results from Google, but instead directly to the page I am interested in i.e.
this and
this respectively. But this is a bit slower, as for queries without any keywords (such as imdb, wiki), it tries to find the domain name containing your query. And so, it's not very useful while you want to search
about something. And sadly, this seems to be absent in Firefox 4! So that's where, the keyword search comes into picture! Go get it, now! :P
