Smart Keywords in Firefox
Smart Keywords are an easy way to search websites right from the Location bar (URL bar). Say you visit The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) all the time to look up things. You go to imdb.com and click in the search box and enter whatever you’re searching for, and click Search. Lots of clicking, lots of steps.
With an IMDB Smart Keyword, you can type imdb Rachel Bilson into Firefox’s Location bar (URL BAR) and hit enter and be taken right to the result.
METHOD 1:
· Visit the page that has the search field that you search with.
· Right click on the search field.
· Choose Add a Keyword for this Search…
· The Add Bookmark dialog will appear.
· Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “IMDB Search” and create a keyword e.g. “imdb” and file the Bookmark somewhere. Firefox comes with a Quick Searches folder so you could use that.
· Click OK
· Now enter imdb Matchstick Men into the (URL) Location bar and press Enter.
METHOD 2:
You can also create it manually:
- Do a search on the site you want to add a quicksearch to.
- Bookmark the page you are brought to (the results page).
- Open the Properties dialog for your new bookmark.
- In your bookmark’s URL (the Location field), find and replace what you searched for with %s (If it does not appear, you cannot use a quicksearch here)
- Add a keyword
Difference between (small s) %s and (Capital S) %S
- (small s): %s will have additional substitution replacements: # by %23, % by %25, / by %2F, and @ by %40.
- (Capital S): %S will not have substitutions and allow use of C++ in a Google search, allow use of @ in an email substitution, allow use of a fragment-id in a url substitution index.html#example2, and use of a directory as in code/example2.txt.
