Making the most of browser custom search engines
Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (and maybe even IE, I’m not sure), all support pretty sophisticated custom search engines and shortcuts, allowing you to search sites pretty easily with just a shortcut key. These are useful for far more than you might think at first glance.
Let’s start boring and take the classic search example: Google. Say you want to search Google by typing “g searchterm” in your address bar (assuming browser didn’t already let you search Google). To do this, you’d create a new custom search, add the shortcut key (“g”) and the URL (http://www.google.com/search?q=%s - note that the %s will get replaced with your search term) and save it. Now type “g awesome” and you will Google the word “awesome.” Meh, right?
Here’s the good part: this isn’t just useful for searching. Since all you’re doing is just sticking a custom word or phrase at an arbitrary location in an arbitrary URL, you can get kind of fancy with it.
Here are some quick examples:
- Pull up a specific Drupal module’s issue queue (
http://drupal.org/project/issues/%s) by typing “di modulename” - Go to an artist’s page on Last.fm (
http://last.fm/music/%s) by typing “fm artistname” - Define a word on definr.com (using
http://definr.com/%s) by typing “d word” - Open a specific subreddit on reddit.com (
http://reddit.com/r/%s) by typing “r redditname” - View a specific task in a task manager (usually something like
http://example.com/tasks/view/%s) by typing “task tasknumber”
See what I mean? If you frequently type in URLs that have a predictable structure, this can be a huge time saver.
Bonus: you can just remove %s from the URL altogether to have instant keyword-accessible bookmarks.
