Search faster with keywords in Firefox

I found this interesting tip on Ghacks. Firefox has a nice built in feature that I never knew about. If you use a search engine a lot, then there is a way that you can add a keyword to Firefox so that you can search that site without actually visiting the site. Take eBay for example. If you go to eBay and right click on the search box and click on “Add a keyword for this search,” then you can set it up so that you can search eBay using your address bar in Firefox. Adding the keyword “e” for eBay will allow you to use “e” in the address bar to search eBay. An example of this would be “e xbox” to search eBay for an Xbox.

You may also use this to add a keyword to your favorite websites. If you have bookmarked a site, there is an option to add a keyword to that bookmark. To add a keyword to a bookmark just click on “Bookmarks” at the top of the window and right click the bookmark that you want to set a keyword to. Then type the keyword that you want to use. For example, setting “jjj” as the keyword for JJjunk will allow me to type “jjj” in my address bar to open JJjunk.com.

Then there is the wildcard option. If you edit the properties of a bookmark you will see the url and the keyword used for that bookmark. If you add “%s” to the beginning of the url, like “%s.google.com”, then you can use the keyword to access other subdomains on that website. For example, if your keyword is set to “g”, then you can type “g video” to go to video.google.com.

I take no credit for finding this out. I found this information on Ghacks.net, which is another great blog. If you have any comments or suggestions, please post them below.