Enjoying a Speedier Search
In the preceding section, you assign a keyword to a bookmark to return to it quickly. That's a great timesaver if the bookmarked page is your final destination, but what if it's just one stop on your route? For example, suppose you need fast access to Google News (http://www.news.google.com), Google's online news aggregator. You could bookmark the site and give it the keyword mw. But every time the front page loads, you still have to type in a word and wait for the definition to load.
Firefox lets you bypass this middle step by sending a word or phrase directly to a page from the Location Bar. For example, in the case of Google News, if news is your keyword for that site, you could type news Super Bowl into the Location Bar to go straight to a page of recent stories about the Super Bowl. In this case, news is a search keyword rather than a bookmark keyword. Naturally, search keywords work only with Web sites that accept search phrases, such as Google, Amazon, and so forth.
To set up this feature, you must tell Firefox what kind of search to conduct when you enter the search keyword and search phrase:
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Navigate to the search Web site.
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Right-click the search box you would normally use to search.
For example, at Google News, you would right-click the search field at the top.
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Choose Add a Keyword for this Search from the menu that appears.
The Add Bookmark window appears.
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Enter a name for the bookmark.
This name will appear in the Bookmarks menu.
REMEMBER Assigning a search keyword is a little bit different than assigning a bookmark keyword. Whereas you can access a regular bookmark by using either the Bookmarks menu or its keyword, search bookmarks require a search phrase and thus can be accessed only by using their keywords (for example, news Super Bowl). They still show up in the Bookmarks menu and have a name, but you shouldn't access them this way. If that's confusing, the takeaway is this: Don't worry about the Name field here. The keyword is all that matters.
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Enter the keyword you want to use.
This is the word you will type into the Location Bar before the search phrase. In my Google News example, I use news.
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Click OK.
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To test your new search keyword, type it into the Location Bar followed by a search phrase and then press Enter.
Firefox includes a set of search keywords by default, and I list them in Table 21-2.
| Keyword | Description | Example (Enter into the Location Bar) |
|---|---|---|
| | Searches for a word or phrase on Google | google ladybugs |
| wp | Searches for a word or phrase on Wikipedia, a community-edited encyclopedia | wp war of 1812 |
| quote | Retrieves trading information for a stock ticker | quote GOOG |
| dict | Retrieves the definition and synonyms of a word or phrase | dict facetious |
