Productivity: The Power Of Firefox Quicksearches

One of the coolest (yet little-known) features in Firefox is the ability to search virtually any website via your address bar. To do this, simply right-click in the search field of a site you want to search and select, “Add A Keyword For This Search”. Once you’ve done this you’ll be prompted to create a bookmark. Call it $whatever-quicksearch and then give it a keyword.

The keyword is the “key” to the whole thing. It’s the prefix that you’re going to use to search that site from now on from the Firefox address bar. Example: I have a quicksearch for Google and its keyword is ‘g’. This lets me search the entire Google site from Firefox’s address bar, just by using the ‘g’ prefix.

So if I am looking for some GTD information related to osx, I can type:

g gtd osx

…which will yield all the results I would have gotten from the main Google site. The difference is that all I had to do was 1) Command-L (Control-L in Windows and Linux) to take me to the address bar, and 2) type my quicksearch prefix + searchterm.

Now, this wouldn’t be all that cool if it worked only for Google, but it works for just about any site you want to search. Just go to the site, make your bookmark/keyword combo, and start saving massive amounts of search time via the Firefox address bar. Below are a few that I have configured. Enjoy.:

Google g $searchterms

Technorati t $searchterms

Wikipedia w $searchterms

MSN Search m $searchterms

Amazon a $searchterms

Gentoo Forums gf $searchterms

Delicious Tags dt $searchterms