Firefox Quicksearches + Delicious = Godlike Powers

By Daniel Miessler on July 16th, 2005: Tagged as Delicious | Firefox | Social

I was looking for a bookmark of mine on delicious a moment ago and did so in a very primitive way — I went to my delicious page and typed my query into the search field.

Well, it dawned on me that there’s a much better way to do this. After remembering that I use Firefox Quicksearches to make my searching tasks more efficient, I went back to my delicious page and simply right-clicked in the search field, elected to create a new quicksearch, and gave it the quicksearch keyword ‘d’. This lets me do this:

d screenshot

…which yields the link on how to take a screenshot in OS X. The key here is that I just searched all of my own custom bookmarks — all of which I added tags and wrote a description for. This is so powerful because I have already narrowed down what I find interesting on my delicious page. Now, using this technique, I can search within that highly distilled list of resources directly from the address bar.

It Gets Crazier

While searching my own links is likely to be most useful, a friend of mine and I instantly realized that this should be extended to the uber-powerful ability to search the delicious/tags option. This, for anyone not familiar, let’s you search for results bearing a particular tag name, i.e. dogs, pictures, etc.

The thing that makes this so powerful is the ability to combine tags to really bring out specific results. You can search for programming+xml, for example, and get back a list of results that have both the programming AND xml tags applied across the entire delicious userbase. Very cool stuff.

Well, let’s add a quicksearch for this functionality and make it possible to yield this godlike power directly from the Firefox address bar. First, go to the delicious tags page. Then right-click in that search field and create another quicksearch. I gave mine the dt keyword. This lets us do this:

dt linux security

Uber-sick. You can, of course, combine tags for searches within your own links using this same method, like so:

d programming css

It’s quite powerful and I’m sure I’ll use it almost every day. Hopefully someone else will get some use out of it as well.





--



10 Comments »

  1. firefox quicksearch for del.icio.us users

    If you’re a del.icio.us user, and you’re not already using Firefox’s very cool quicksearch feature for fast access to del.icio.us bookmarks, head over to dmiessler.com for a couple of cool tips….

    Trackback by Asa Dotzler on firefox, cats, mars, and more — 7/18/2005 @ 5:33 pm

  2. I’m absolutely addicted to Custom Keywords, so I added a similar setup a while ago.

    Another idea: go to about:config and set http://del.icio.us/username/ as the value for keyword.URL. Now type a keyword in the Location Bar and hit enter. Firefox will now take you to http://del.icio.us/username/keyword.

    Comment by Jonathan Horak — 7/18/2005 @ 7:06 pm

  3. Quick del.icio.us search with Firefox

    Del.icio.us user Daniel Miessler searches del.icio.us bookmarks and tags from the Firefox address bar by typing d searchterm in the Firefox address bar. Here’s how to set it up: Using Firefox, go to the del.icio.us tags page here (or your…

    Trackback by Lifehacker — 7/19/2005 @ 1:00 pm

  4. Daniel - If you like quicksearches, you might also like YubNub.org which is a “social” quicksearch. Actually I like to make a quicksearch for YubNub, so I can do “y tec foo camp” to do a technorati search for foo camp, or “y a ambidextrous” to do an answers.com search, etc.

    Comment by Jonathan Aquino — 7/19/2005 @ 9:55 pm

  5. [...] rchterms MSN Search m $searchterms Amazon a $searchterms Gentoo Forums gf $searchterms Delicious Tags dt $searchterms

    [...]

    Pingback by dmiessler.com - grep understanding knowledge » Productivity: The Power Of Firefox Quicksearches — 7/19/2005 @ 10:50 pm

  6. I set up d for del.icio.us so that d bbrown goes to http://del.icio.us/bbrown/

    Then I set up db for del.icio.us/bbrown so that db asp.net goes to http://del.icio.us/bbrown/asp.net.

    I also set up del for http://del.icio.us/search/?search=%s so that del asp.net searches my del.icio.us bookmarks for asp.net content.

    At your suggestion, I’ve now set up dt for del.icio.us/tags/ so that dt asp.net goes to http://del.icio.us/tags/asp.net.

    Comment by Bill Brown — 7/20/2005 @ 9:00 am

  7. I can atest to the usefulnes of this tip. I hooked up a keyword like that a few months ago and have hardly used google since. The results are just so much better for the types of searches I most often do.

    Having used this for awhile, one feature I’d like to see is a way to run a tag search over a group of people. One particularly useful group would be all del.ici.ous users who joined prior to a given date. Another would be all users who are subscribed to a given user. Tricky, but how cool would that be?

    Comment by Matt Constantine — 7/20/2005 @ 2:48 pm

  8. [...] Quick Search

     July 20th, 2005 |  


I read an article this morning about using the quicksearch feature in Firefox to sift through your del.icio.us bookmarks. It’s a very useful f [...]

    Pingback by PmNet. We don’t validate. » Del.icio.usly Quick Search — 7/20/2005 @ 3:56 pm

  9. del.icio.us quick search

    dmiessler.com - grep understanding knowledge Firefox Quicksearches Delicious = Godlike Powers (Repost) 在之前看過快速新增del.icio.us書籤之後，陸續發現一些相關的小技巧，都是使用bookmark的keyword屬性，可以方便地在…

    Trackback by 異想天開 — 8/9/2005 @ 11:33 pm

  10. thanks alot very good blog

    Comment by smith — 12/1/2005 @ 2:27 pm

RSS Feed For This Post...

Leave a Comment...