Firefox Hacks: URL Keyword Commands

Most of us will have used the Google toolbar or search box to perform a search from the web browser, but did you know you could type commands right into your URL bar?

When you bookmark a site you can edit the bookmark to give it a keyword. Entering this keyword in the URL bar will take you straight to that website.

That’s pretty cool already for keyboard fans, but there is more! You can use this system to enable searches on your favorite online services right from the URL bar too.

Take Flickr as an example. Go to Flickr and right-click (or CTRL-click for Mac users) on the keyword text box. You will see the following context menu appear.

Click “Add a keyword for this Search” and you will  be asked for a name for the bookmark (eg.  “Flickr”) and a keyword, which will effectively be the command you type.

So if you chose Flickr for the keyword you can now enter “flickr banff” in your URL bar to search Flickr for Banff-related pictures.

Neat eh?

What it does is insert any words you put after the keyword as the phrases to search for, and this will work with most of the online searches you can think of.

Now what if rather than a straight search with a handy form, you want to hack URLs? For example, you might have a favorite online tool that uses tag-based navigation, or the service might not play nice with the quick search.

All you have to do is bookmark the site in the usual way, then go back and edit to enter your keyword. Firefox also supplies a way for you to insert any search phrases you like using “%s” where ever you need them. “%s” is swapped out in the URL with your phrases when the browser navigates to the target site.

As an example, when I discover a new blog I like to see what people are saying about them. Technorati offers a “reactions” view for this purpose but to get there is a little fiddly. To make it easy I can add a bookmark

… then edit the bookmark to apply the keyword and alter the URL to insert the “%s”.

So the URL goes from being “http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.chrisg.com?reactions” to “http://www.technorati.com/blogs/%s?reactions”.

If we then enter “reactions www.chrisg.org” we will see the blog reactions for my personal blog.

Why don’t you try it on your favorite searches? It works on eBay, Amazon, Thesaurus sites … it could be very useful!

Do you use this feature? Which sites do you use it with? Share your favorite Firefox Hacks in the comments ….

Posted on November 20, 2007 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Productivity

Comments

26 Responses to “Firefox Hacks: URL Keyword Commands”

  1. Sebastian on November 20th, 2007 3:33 pm

    Great hack. Very handy.

    I use Launchy to start my applications, which detects this keywords in bookmarks so:
    1. I bookmark the Google Images search as “Images”.
    2. Then in launchy (I don’t even have Firefox open) I just type “im…” and the launcher suggest me the bookmark, I press TAB to use that address and add something else, let say “bottle design”. That leads me to a Google image search of “bottle design”.

    great combination with a lot of potential.

  2. Chris Garrett on November 20th, 2007 5:28 pm

    Nice tip, thanks Sebastian :)

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