- This article applies to Firefox and WireKeys.
In Firefox and Mozilla Suite you can specify keywords for bookmarks by filling in the “Keyword” field in the bookmark’s Properties. When you type the keyword into the Location Bar and hit [Enter], the keyword will be replaced with the bookmarked URL. For example, bookmarking http://google.com/, giving it a keyword of “g”, and typing “g” into the Location Bar will take you to Google.
What makes keywords very powerful is that if you add a “%s” at some place in your bookmark’s URL, it will be replaced by the words you type in after the keyword. (These are sometimes called “Quicksearches”.) For example, if we were to modify the bookmark mentioned above so that it pointed to “http://google.com/?q=%s”, we can type “g mozilla” into the Location Bar to arrive at “http://google.com/search?q=mozilla”.
Default searches
By default, Mozilla Firefox comes with several bookmarks with keywords defined. They’re located in the “Quick Searches” folder in the default bookmarks.
Creating bookmarks with keywords
In Mozilla Firefox, you can simply right-click in a search field on a web page and choose “Add a Keyword for this Search.” This will pop up a dialog for you to add a bookmark name and keyword.
You can also create it manually:
- Do a search on the site you want to add a quicksearch to.
- Bookmark the page you are brought to (the results page).
- Open the Properties dialog for your new bookmark.
- In your bookmark’s URL (the Location field), find and replace what you searched for with %s (If it does not appear, you cannot use a quicksearch here)
- Add a keyword
Note: Mozilla Suite users can use the “Bookmarks > File Bookmark...” feature and edit bookmark’s properties at the moment of its creation.
Below is a list of various keyword searches for
Mozilla Suite and
Firefox. The keywords shown are only a suggestion and you can change them to fit your preferences. The keywords are case-insensitive. To use a keyword, type the keyword followed by the search terms in the Location Bar. For more information refer to
Using keyword searches.
For keyword searches not listed below, the Mozilla extension NeedleSearch allows you to discover the requied URI parameters, not only for searches, but for many other types of forms based interfaces.
Search engines
References
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