Useful Firefox quick search bookmarks

I like making efficient use of my time, so I’m a big fan of anything that makes common tasks easier. I noticed a small set of web sites that I used a great deal, and realized that making it faster to use those sites would result in significant time savings.

I’ve already talked about quicksearches in Firefox before, so I won’t go into great detail. Essentially they let you go directly to a site’s results page, bypassing the front page in a single bound. To do this, you assign a letter representing the web site, then type the letter followed by the search terms. You can do this for any site you want. For example, to search Amazon I type z and then whatever I’m searching for. Here are the quick bookmarks I currently use.

Web site Bookmark URL Keyword
Google http://www.google.com/search?q=%s g
Answers http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?gwp=13&s=%s a
Google Finance http://finance.google.com/finance?q=%s q
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s w
Amazon http://amazon.com/s/?url=index%3Dblended&keywords=%s z
IMDB http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s i
Dictionary http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/%s t
Thesaurus http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%s d

It’s quite simple to create quick bookmarks for other sites.

  1. Go to the site you want to create a quick bookmark for and search for something (like the word ‘test’)
  2. Bookmark the results page
  3. Go to your bookmarks in Firefox (Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks) and go to the properties of the new bookmark
  4. Replace the search phrase you used (‘test’) with %s. (Note: Firefox will replace the %s with whatever you type when using the quick bookmark)

That’s all there is to it.

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