Firefox Keywords

I've been using the Firefox internet browser for many moons now and I absolutely love it. I don't know if it is even possible to go back to MSIE ever. But this isn't going to be a rant against MSIE. This post is about Firefox's keywords.

You can assign keywords to do many things. You can bookmark a website and assign a keyword to it. For example, you can bookmark this site, dragonballyee.blogs.com, and assign the keyword "philly" to it. Or "dragonballyee" or whatever. You can then, at any time, click in your URL bar and just type in "philly" and then hit enter and whammo, it automatically will bring you here. Pretty sweet, eh? But the fun doesn't stop there.

You can assign keywords to searches. Go to your favorite search engine, mine if you haven't noticed yet is Google. You can right-click in the search field and an option appears to "Add a Keyword for this Search" at which point you select that option. Then, you can input the name of the bookmark and the keyword of your choice; for Google, mine is just "g". Now, how to use that keyword.

To use the search keyword [or in this case, letter] you just click in your URL bar and type in the keyword you have saved with your bookmark and then a search string. So say, I wanted to search for the phrase "dragonballyee" I'd input: "g dragonballyee" and hit enter. And just like that, a Google search is performed and you're redirected to that search in the window below.

I only yesterday fully discovered this function. I've always known about it, but for some reason, never used it. Now, I don't know if I can go back. I've used the "dict" search for all this time, but never understood fully how it worked, now I do.

Here's the MozillaZine article on quick searches. And here's their list of some popular keyword searches.

I'm gonna assemble a list of keyword searches on the bottom of the left column on this blog here for anyone who'd like to start a set of searches for their own. Just right-click and save the bookmark to a folder and then assign that bookmark a keyword. I've included my keyword as a tooltip. If you hold the cursor over the link, my keyword will appear.

But before you do anything, you gotta download Firefox. Happy surfing!

Comments

[Melissa]

I've been using Firefox for a while now and I too love it. Too bad I still have to support I.E. at work. Thanks for providing the keyword info. I think I'll give it a shot.

[Sam]

Thanks for the tip. I've been using Firefox for years I think, and have barely touched the surface of the features offered. I personally like the adblock extension.

[Matt]

cool. I didn't know about this either...thanks for the heads-up.

[albert]

I aim to please