Quicksearch bookmarks in Firefox

Quicksearch bookmarks are something that I just assumed everybody knew about. Apparently not! Stu and a few others in the dabs office hadn’t heard about this so I decided to blog it just in case you missed it too.

Since as long as I can remember, Firefox has supported keyword shortcuts in its bookmarks. In plain english, you can assign a phrase or a couple of letters to a bookmark and then type that phrase into the address bar of the browser, hit return and the bookmark is loaded. No need to use your mouse to trawl through menu’s and sub menu’s.

The way you do this is to get properties on the bookmark (right click the bookmark and choose properties) and put your desired keystroke combination in the Keyword field:

The image above shows that I’ve used “gs” as a shortcut to the Google Search bookmark.

The really neat part of this functionality is that you can have strings inserted into the bookmark as its loaded by putting %s in the URL where you want the string to appear. So given the bookmark:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
from the example above, if I type “gs highly visible” (without the quotes) into my address bar, I instantly get a list of Google Result pages for the phrase “highly visible”. Firefox replaced %s with my string before it loaded the URL.

The possibilities for this are limitless. Any URL which has a search term in the querystring can be hacked to work in the same way as the above example.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.