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Here’s a fun and useful FireFox tip: You can search websites from the location bar too!

If you’re a power user, you make frequent trips to the search bar and the location bar in FireFox. The search bar is useful, but if you regularly search many different sites, this quick trick will save you untold amounts of time by allowing you to use the location bar to run search queries in this form:

<specified keyword> <specified search query>

After this simple tutorial, you’ll know how to run a Google search for “bananas” by typing this in your location bar:

google bananas

Here’s how to do it:

Before beginning this tutorial, please note that I use Chromifox, a FireFox theme that imitates Google Chrome. My screenshots look like I’m using Google Chrome, but this trick is for FireFox, not Chrome.

1. Find a site to search for.

Any site that you frequently run searches on is worth testing out. To see if this can work for the website, run a search.

• Go to the website you want to test and search for something. For example, I would go to Google.com and search for “cars”.
• Look at the resulting URL (the URL is the web address of the page, in the location bar up top). The URL for my Google search is :

  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cars&btnG=Search&aq=f

• Do you see what you searched for in the URL? If so, then keep going — you can use this site! I see my result in my search:

  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cars&btnG=Search&aq=f

2. Bookmark the search results page and organize your bookmarks

Bookmark the results page of your search by going into your “Bookmarks” menu and selecting “Bookmark this Page” (or just hit CTRL + D).

After bookmarking the page, go back into your “Bookmarks” menu and this time select “Organize Bookmarks…”. Browse to the location that you saved the bookmark into (“Bookmarks Menu” if you didn’t save it elsewhere). Select your bookmark, and you should see a few details about it at the bottom of the window. Click on the “More” button.

Information for a bookmark in the Bookmarks Library

3. Create a keyword & change the location

If you look at the “location” text field, you should see the URL from earlier. Remember how you found your search in the URL? Do that again, and this time replace your search with “%s”.

For example, I would change my old Google URL to:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Search&aq=f

Then, in the box for “Keyword” specify the phrase you want to use in the location bar to make your search. For Google, I choose “google”, but you can choose whatever keyword you want. Enter the keyword into the keyword box and close the Bookmarks window.

A modified bookmark. 'google' is the new search query, and notice that 'cars' has been replaced with '%s' in the location.

4. Test out your search

In the location bar, type in your keyword followed by what you want to search for. If the results page for your search shows up, then congratulations! You did it!

In my example, “google” was my keyword. Let’s suppose I want to search for “president obama”. In the location bar, I would type in “google president obama” and hit Enter. This would load up the search results for Google for President Obama.

When you type in the keyword, this loads up the bookmark for that keyword. The “%s” in the location of the bookmark is replaced by everything after the keyword.

The beauty of using keywords to search

The main advantage of using keywords like this to search from the location bar is that you can have many different searches for many sites. The search bar is nice, but you have to manually select the site you want to search for from the list if it’s different than the current one. This is inconvenient and a hassle.

But by using a keyword, all you have to remember is the keyword. You can have different keywords for a bunch of different searches.

A few search URLs

Here’s a quick list of search URLs for common sites. All you need to do is save them as a bookmark and create a keyword, like you did earlier.

• Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
• Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/002-3332151-8124054?search-alias=aps&keywords=%s
• Dictionary: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s
• RateYourMusic: http://rateyourmusic.com/search?searchterm=%s&searchtype=artist
• SongMeanings: http://www.songmeanings.net/query.php?action=title&query=%s
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go
• YouTube: http://youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_sort=relevance&search_query=%s&search=Search
• IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s&x=0&y=0
• eBay: http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38.l1313&_nkw=%s&_sacat=See-All-Categories
• Ultimate-Guitar: http://ultimate-guitar.com/search.php?s=%s&w=songs

Keywords don’t need to be used for searches.

Using keywords for searches is a definite timesaver, but keywords in general are useful as well. If you don’t specify “%s” in the location, by simply entering the keyword into the location bar, you can quickly load a page.

Say there’s a website you go to regularly, but the URL is long and a pain to remember. Rather than always hunt around in your bookmark’s menu for it, simply create a quick keyword, type that keyword into the location bar, and hit enter to be directed to that page.

You can also use the “%s” trick in other ways besides searches. Any site that sends data in the URL is eligible. For example, I’ve set up a Google Maps page that gives me directions from my house to anywhere by just typing in “map” followed by the location I’m trying to reach.

Keywords are a surprisingly unknown feature of FireFox. Using keywords can save you a ton of time and hassle, all the while making Internet browsing less painful.

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