I was listening to Leo Laporte’s “The Tech Guy” podcast and a caller said he was using Chrome because he could Google from the address bar. I was really surprised that neither he nor Leo (seem to) have heard of keyword searches!

Keyword searches in FireFox is a service which lets you add special bookmarks (at least they’re saved as bookmarks) where you can do any kind of search from the address bar. Go to any search you use a lot- Google, Flickr, Faceboook, Twitter etc etc, right click the search field and select “add a keyword for this search”. You then type in a description and a keyword for the search, and then you can do that search from the address bar by typing the keyword and then the search phrase. For instance, I use “g” for Google which means that I can Google extremely quickly just by using a g in the address bar. If I want to Google “star trek” i type “g star trek” in the address bar and press enter.

I also have dozens of other keywords, including a for Amazon, img for Google images, pg for the norwegian price checking service Prisguide (priceguide), w is Wikipedia etc etc.  This is easily one of my (if not the single) most used feature in FireFox and the thing I miss the most when I use other people’s computers. Combined with ctrl+t for “open new tab” I get my search results as other people are typing the URL to the site with the search engine. Recommended to anyone who wants to be a bit more effective.