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Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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Adding smart keywords to your online searches

I end up searching several different web sites frequently, and it’s a pain going to the site first, then entering my search term, and finally looking at the results. Luckily Firefox has a huge shortcut to this. Here’s how:

  1. Go to the page with the search form. For this example, let’s go to the MSDN  home page.
  2. In the “Search MSDN for” box in the upper right, put the mouse over the search box, and right-click. In the menu that pops up, select “Add a keyword for this search…”
  3. The “Add a Bookmark” dialog box will appear. Enter “MSDN home page” in the Name field, and enter your preferred shortcut term in the Keyword field. I’m going to use “msdn”.
  4. You can change the folder the bookmark will be created in if you want. For now accept the default and click “Ok”.
  5. Go to Google’s home page, just so you know Firefox isn’t cheating.
  6. Click in the URL bar (or press Alt+D), and type “msdn asp.net 2” without the quotes.

You should see the MSDN/Microsoft search page with the first 10 results for “ASP.NET 2”. Now go add more smart keywords!

Download Firefox now!



Comments

Darrell said:

Excellent! That could be the next tip.
# October 1, 2004 8:30 AM

Darrell Norton's Blog said:

Adding pre-made smart keyword searches
# October 4, 2004 7:55 AM

Darrell Norton's Blog said:

Selecting the search engine in the Firefox search bar
# October 7, 2004 7:40 AM

BDMatrix said:

Nice trick! Exactly what i was looking for ! Thanx:D.

Note: I couldnt make it work w/ yahoo search . :( Any suggestions?
# November 4, 2004 4:40 PM

Darrell said:

# November 5, 2004 1:02 AM

Joao Pedro said:

Very cool!!!
Thanks a lot for the tip.
After adding some keywords, now I can do:
"d <word>" for a dicionary search
"w <word>" for a Wikipedia search
"a <word>" for a Amazon search
and so on.
It's faster than use the search bar!!!
# January 5, 2005 12:08 PM
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