Firefox’s Best Kept Secret

By David Golding

I’ll admit it: I love Safari. As with many Apple products, it’s just beautiful. I love the Aqua-fied buttons and forms in the main browser window and the sleek metallic look of the interface. With the advent of Firefox, well I have only been so-so in terms of my own personal use. Absolutely ecstatic about PC users adopting it over IE, though. (If you still use IE, goodness, I honestly don’t know what to say…) But as for me making the move over to Firefox, I guess I’ve been just a little slow. My final reason, the one I’ve stood by for so long, was an enhancement made back in the day with Safari Keywords and more recently with Sogudi. This feature became indispensable for me.

Well, I have now made the switch in great measure because of Firefox’s best-kept secret. Right under my nose it was built in all along, just like Safari Keywords and Sogudi.

Seaching is a beast

Searching the web is a beast, and not because of the accessibility. The web is plenty accessible. It’s having to navigate to a bunch of sites to make the searches. I’ve always wanted just one place where I could search them all. For example, if I wanted to search eBay, I’d have to go there, select the search field, type the query and click “Search.” And so on for Wikipedia, Google, Clusty, or whatever.

Firefox actually brings together the search power into the browser to search any of these sites right from the browser window. And I’m not talking about the search field in the upper-right corner.

No Mouse

What slows me down considerably is to have to use the mouse. Right now, if you want this capability in Firefox using the search field, you have to install the search plugin, select it, type in the field and hit return. Then it runs the search for you. This would be alright if it weren’t for the fact that you have to use your mouse at least once (usually more).

The best-kept secret requires no mouse use, which I find indispensable for my web surfing experience.

The Best-Kept Secret

I’m going to set up an automatic search function in Firefox using bookmarks to run queries through Wikipedia. Here’s what I mean. All I do is type “wiki” and then the query in the URL field, or location box, in the Firefox browser. It will run the search right there without me having to browse to the site, find the search field, and run the query. The beauty is, you can do this for any site. Here’s how.

Open up Firefox and browse to the site of your choice. In my example, I’ll show you how to set up Wikipedia. You’ll find the search box on the homepage of Wikipedia. Run any kind of query through it. I’m running “salad.” It runs the query as “http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad”. So I copy the URL.

Now, in Firefox, go to the menu Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks. Select “New Bookmark” and type in the name whatever you want (e.g. “Wikipedia”). In “Location,” paste the URL from Wikipedia. Now here’s the secret: replace “Salad” with %s. The URL should appear like so:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

What the “%s” is telling Firefox is that it should replace that with the query.

Last step, pick any kind of keyword. In this case, type “wiki” in the “Keyword” field. You’re done. Go to the standard URL field and type in “wiki salad” and it will search Wikipedia for an entry about salad. Well, you can type “wiki” + space + query for any search string and it will pass that into Wikipedia for you.

This can be applied for any site. Just find out what the URL search string is, and plop that bad boy into the Firefox bookmark, replace the query piece with “%s” and assign a keyword and you’re in business. Here are some pre-configured ones for you:

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