Power searching with Yahoo! and Firefox shortcuts.

By way of Dare Obasanjo, I learned of Yahoo! Shortcuts.

They seem pretty cool all by themselves, but combined with a browser trick I learned ages ago, I think I'm hooked. Here's the trick (in Firefox anyway): create a bookmark named “Y” with the location “http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s” and the keyword “y”.

Now “y your search” in the browser address bar will search Yahoo! for “your search”. And if you put a shortcut in there, it'll do that too. For example, to find the Wikipedia URI for “Firefox” above, I typed “y !wiki firefox” into the address bar. Sweet.

I setup the shortcut “!nwn” to search for pages on my blog, so “y !nwn my search” will find the pages on my blog where I mentioned “my search”. Ok, maybe not useful so much for you, but useful for me sometimes.

Comments:

Why not simply use Firefox keywords? Much easier!

Posted by Sjoerd Visscher on 21 Dec 2005 @ 09:42pm UTC #

Why bother with the !? To go to Wikipedia's Firefox page in Firefox, I just type "wp firefox". See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5358 for more.

This keymark thing is built into Firefox, too. It's not like you need to install some Greasemonkey extension.

Posted by Bob DuCharme on 22 Dec 2005 @ 01:45am UTC #

Ehm, ehm -- always amused when Firefox users discovered this feature which was in Konqueror for years (at least since 3.0, but I think it was in 2.*). At least once I can smile to Firefox users :-) So I do not have to go through Yahoo! -- just type wiki:firefox into location bar and that's it.

Matej

Posted by Matej Cepl on 22 Dec 2005 @ 03:43am UTC #

Ok. Consensus seems to be that I could just use firefox and be done with it. Fair enough. Maybe I wasn't seeing the forest for the trees, I dunno. Nevermind. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 22 Dec 2005 @ 12:37pm UTC #

Definitely, no need to go through Y! to use these shorthands, define your own. I have a bunch of single or two letter quick search bookmarks for [g]oogle, [y]ahoo, [w]ikipedia, [p]erl (or python, or PHP), and so on. Very handy: Alt+D g keywords...

Posted by Douglas Clifton on 24 Dec 2005 @ 05:36am UTC #
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