Firefox Quicksearches + Google Keywords = Sick Power
By Daniel Miessler on May 7th, 2007: Tagged as Firefox | Google | Productivity
Back in 2005 I wrote about how you can use Firefox Quicksearches to vastly reduce your search time. You do this by adding a key-character for searches, such as “g” for Google, and “w” for Wikipedia. Then you just do a ctrl/cmd-L to get to Firefox’s URL bar, and then type:
g ron paul
…to search for Ron Paul using Google.
But now it’s even more powerful due to the Google command line. Instead of just doing regular searches, we can now pass along which type of search we want to do. Here’s how to search for a map of San Francisco, for example:
…and you can do the same with /img, /title, etc.:
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That’s awesome. I wasn’t reading your blog back in ‘05 when you first posted this so I’m glad you’ve revisited the topic. This is definitely getting set up on my browser asap.
You can also use Alt-D to get to the URL bar which seems flows a little better than CTRL-L, at least to me. Well, I don’t know; maybe your way is easier.
Of course, CTRL-T gives you a new tab AND puts you at the URL bar, which I’ll probably use more anyway.
Comment by chris — 5/7/2007 @ 11:29 am
Arguably, you could already do this with the URL field in Firefox. Either setup a quicksearch for Google Maps (e.g., gm americus ga), or use Google’s built-in modifiers (g phonesearch: somebody somewhere).
The benefit of Google Command Line is you can just setup a single quicksearch that’ll perform a lot of specialized searches. The downside is more stuff to remember than setting up individual quicksearches. For example, if I want to search images on Google…
Google Command Line: g /img butterflies
Plain Ol’ Quicksearch: gi butterflies
One is more work initially, the other is more work later. Neither is much work at all.
Comment by Jason Powell — 5/7/2007 @ 11:41 am
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Pingback by average admins » Blog Archive » Firefox Quicksearches + Google Keywords = Sick Power — 5/7/2007 @ 11:51 am
Firefox Quicksearches are great. What makes them even better is QuickSilver. Whereas with Firefox you have to switch to the application and then ctrl/cmd-L, with QuickSilver I can be anywhere in the OS and have access to the QuickSearch. In your example I would key: cmd-space, g, then tab, tab, and then type: /maps sf .
QuickSilver is also great for bookmarks. To me, it never made since to create lots of bookmarks because it takes so long to scroll through them. However, with QuickSilver bookmarks are indexed, so to access your blog I can just type from anywhere, cmd-space, tab, tab, and then : drm .
Comment by Tony Vance — 5/7/2007 @ 3:08 pm
[...] out there I’m rather obsessed with doing things the best way possible. Up until yesterday I was using browser-based quick searches to perform quick Internet searches. But there’s a better [...]
Pingback by dmiessler.com | Better Quicksearches with QuickSilver — 10/11/2007 @ 2:29 am