Address-bar Searches in Firefox and Internet Explorer
An address-bar search is a quick shorthand search typed in the address-bar field. By default Internet Explorer searches MSN. With a little tweaking, you can use keywords to make it search Google, IMDB, or any other web-search you desire…
Firefox does it easily, and Internet Explorer can be taught.
They work similarly. You type in ” keyword ’search words’ “, and hit enter. For instance “imdb star wars” to search IMDb for “Star Wars”.
Configuring Mozilla Firefox
Firefox comes pre-installed with a few address-bar searches, or “quick searches” as they are called. Unfortunately I deleted all existing bookmarks upon install, but I believe they are in a bookmarks folder called “Quick Searches”, and among others will let you “goto searchwords”.Making keyword searches in Mozilla Firefox is much easier than in IE, though.
1. Go to a search engine, search for something.
2. Edit the search URL, and replace your search words with “%s”.
3. Bookmark this URL
4. Right-click the bookmark, and type in a keyword in the “Keyword” box.
It should look something like this:
Capturing the search URL for Google’s “Feeling Lucky” can be a bit tricky, so here it is:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnI=I'm%20Feeling%20Lucky
Configuring Internet Explorer
Before I go into detail with how this is done, you should know, there is an easy way out.To enable, and tweak address-bar searches in Internet Explorer, one has to delwe into the registry, or use a program called TweakUI. TweakUI will basically work as a frontend, and let you type in keywords, and counterpart searches.
A search must look like this:
http://www.imdb.com/Find?for=%s
Notice it says “%s” — this is the search string
If you do not use TweakUI, you’ll have to dig into
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearchUrl[keyword]
The easy way out is to download these pre-built searches and run them!
With Firefox, you can automatically add keyword’s search bookmarks by clicking on the contextual menu of any search’s fields input on a page, and choose “add a keyword for this search”.
I run Linux, and the mozilla that is pre-installed on Fedora Core 2 has a great feature wherre by you just type words and a “Search google ” bar appears underneath it. Is ther ea way to implement this in Firefox?
Firefox has a built-in “auto search this page” feature, that starts when you simply type. Start typing a word, and Firefox will hightlight the first word on the page you’re looking at, that starts with what you’re typing. A form of inline search, if you will.
In late nightlies of Firefox, this feature not only highlights the word you’re looing for, but spawns a new search toolbar, that also has the text you’re typing, and a “search” button. Once that version of Firefox is released to the public (i.e. version 1.0), I’m certain that adding a “search Google” button will be possible via an extension.
However, currently, I don’t think you can do that particular thing, John.
Interesting. I wonder why it was incorporated into Mozilla (Fedora came with 1.7.x) and not FF?
It is not too bad, but I have not found a reasonable tool like “Dave’s Quick Search bar” for Linux as of yet.
I’m afraid I can’t help you with software for Linux as I never ran it, but I think the main reason that feature wasn’t put into firefox was that the developers wanted to start over. Strip away all but the most necessary UI, and build it back in, better, if it’s really needed.
I’ve been experimenting with Firefox Quick Searches, adding all my favorite search engines. One cool thing I tried that I haven’t seen mentioned before is using a translation tool. There’ll often be a story in German or French that I want to read, but copying the URL and going to a translation site to search it is too much work.
In my case I went to Google’s Translation Service, then under “Translate a web page:”, r-click like Thanaos said above, and you have German to English (used g2e as my keyword), or English to French (e2f) or whatever translation is available. When I come upon a site I can’t read, I just have to put the keyword ahead of the URL. Awesome.
Thank you for showing how to get IE to have bookmark keywords! I use them all the time on Firefox, and I really missed them when I have to use IE.