Reader Tip of the Week: Trick Out Your Firefox Search Bar
April 9th, 2007 (12:00pm) Anne Zelenka 6 Comments
Pamela of Infinishare Technologies points out that you can add new searches to the Firefox Search Bar located in the upper right hand corner of the browser window. You can choose from YouTube, Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster, Technorati, MarketWatch, and many others.
Want to get really fancy? Create your own custom search on Google Co-op and then make it available for others to add to their Firefox (or IE) search bars using the OpenSearch format. It’s a little tricky, but Michael Cote’ of RedMonk has created a screencast showing how he did it.
Keyboard shortcuts for the Firefox search bar
As long as you’re making your search bar smarter, remind yourself of the keyboard shortcuts for accessing it:
<Ctrl/Cmd>+K in Windows/Mac/Linux or <Ctrl>+J in Linux to go to search box
<Ctrl/Cmd>+<down> to move down in search engine listings
<Ctrl/Cmd>+<up> to move up
Have a tech, productivity, or career tip for WWD readers?
Email it to tips AT webworkerdaily.com. Include your blog or website address if you’d like us to link to it.
6 Comments Post your own comment
João Craveiro says: April 9th, 2007 12:06pm
1. Both Ctrl+J and Ctrl+K work on Linux.
2. Moving in the search engine list, on Linux, is performed with Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down.
Anne Zelenka says: April 9th, 2007 12:40pm
Thanks for the corrections, Joao. Actually, it’s Ctrl/Cmd+up and Ctrl/Cmd+down on Mac and Windows too — though I could have sworn I was using Page Up and Page Down yesterday.
Master William says: April 10th, 2007 3:55am
Quicksilver
coolkid says: April 11th, 2007 7:21am
Ctrl+E also goes to searchbox
nixnax says: April 11th, 2007 8:05pm
Instead of having a separate search bar taking up space, I prefer integrating everything into address field.
A quick tip here: http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#beh_search
and then just add keywords for searches.
Then I just jump into address field (ctrl+L or F6) and type e.g. “g webworker” to search with google or “a webworker” to use alltheweb etc.
arteKa Internet Communication » Blog Archive » 10 Ways to Power Up Your Firefox Search says: May 25th, 2007 3:56am
[...] might you want to hide it entirely? Because you can do every search you want from the Location Bar. Use keyword searches that work from the location bar. Then all you do is go to the Location Bar [...]