Ever wished you could search any site you wanted to without first going to the site, finding the search box, typing in the search? Ever wish you had a quick and easy way to go directly to a word on dictionary.com or thesaurus.com? Ever wish you had something like the Google Bar for any website? Now you can! I just discovered a nifty feature in Firefox called Bookmark Keywords.
What Bookmark Keywords let you do is create a bookmark which you can access by typing a keyword into the address bar. For instance, I might make the keyword “doug” pull up my blog. I addition to that I can create a special bookmark which allows me to use that keyword to search the site by typing something like “doug coldfusion”. That would spawn a search of DougHughes.net for the keyword “coldfusion”. Like most everything in Firefox it’s a hidden feature, but it’s easy to use when you know how.
To create a Bookmark Keywords go to a search results page on any website and add a bookmark. For instance, I went to my blog, ran a search, and bookmarked the search results page. The bookmark ended up being a for this url:
http://www.doughughes.net/index.cfm/page-search?query=coldfusion&Submit=Go%21
After creating the bookmark I open up the properties of the bookmark using the Bookmark Manager. I replace the text which I searched for with “%s” and assign the keyword “doug” to the bookmakr. I used “doug” as the keyword. The “%s” tells Firefox to insert the text you type after the keyword where the “%s” is the URL. My bookmarked URL now looks like this:
http://www.doughughes.net/index.cfm/page-search?query=%s&Submit=Go%21
After saving the updates to my bookmark I can now search DougHughes.net for coldfusion by typing the following into my address bar:
doug coldfusion
Some great uses I’ve found for this are to setup keywords for dictionary.com and thesaurus.com. This lets me easily look up synonyms for “vociferous” quickly and easily or to find the definition of the word “cudgel”.
The one thing I don’t think you can do, which I’d love to be able to, is chain a set of keywords to search across multiple sites and open the results in new tabs. That would allow me to assign the keyword coldfusion to lots of coldfusion sites and I could easily search across all the sites with one query. Ah well, maybe I should suggest that to the Firefox guys. (Hell, maybe you already can do this!)
Here’s a link to some more detailed instructions and where I learned about Firefox keywords.
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "Firefox Bookmark Keywords Tutorial" (5)
I found a great use for this: –
Namely, I want to make pdf files of a lot of sites I look at to save for reference later on.
Normally I’d use http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/pdf-o-matic.php for this task, but, using the firefox keyword pdf and the following url: –
Click to access pdf-o-matic.php
this allows me to type pdf http://url_of_my_choosing.com
into the address bar and hey presto a pdf for me to save/email/whatever.
🙂
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Looks like there’s a slight error in the link when I try to use it in a bookmark. PDF-O-Matic gives me an error on the “x=0” portion-says my URL is invalid . Removed that and it works fine:
“http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/pdf-o-matic.php?URL=%s&y=0&FORMAT=.pdf”
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looks like you’re right – I’ve been using your updated link for a little while now…
Also, if you’re a flock user (it’s based on Firefox, but with extra media-related features) it’ll work with that if you re-enable the firefox keywords feature (I had a link explaining how to do that but I’ve misplaced it. 😦 )
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So today I started to think about starting my online business and to purchase any affiliate websites I just don’t know if it is best option to build one myself or get any already turnkey affiliate marketing websites. I just discovered site
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