I was talking with Jonathan about search keywords in Firefox today and said I’d send him my search keyword bookmarks file because he hadn’t used them before. This is one of those things that is too valuable to not share, so I’m posting the info here. The Firefox search keyword is an excellent feature that unfortunately few people know about. It’s basically an extension of the bookmark. Here’s how it works: You can assign bookmarks a keyword. You can then type this keyword into the address bar and the browser brings you directly to the bookmarked URL. In addition to that, there is a special identifier, %s, that you can insert into the address of the bookmark. Then if you put text after the keyword in the address bar, the text will be inserted into the URL where the %s was.

Here’s an example: If you have a bookmark of “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” and give it a keyword “g”, then typing “g linux” into the address bar will bring you to “http://www.google.com/search?q=linux”, which is a Google search for linux. That’s it.

Here’s a bookmark file that includes the search keywords I use: Kevin’s Search Keywords

Just import that into Firefox to use them. After the cut is a description of each included search keyword.


Search Keyword Description List:

a – Amazon search
bt – Mininova Search
d – Dictionary Search
g – Google Search
gg – Google Groups Search
gi – Google Images Search
gm – Google Maps Search
gv – Google Video Search
imdb – IMDB Search
w – Wikipedia Search
yt – Youtube Search