If you’ve ever wanted to do a whois, host, nslookup or ping on a domain and you use Firefox, this tip is for you.

You can run those commands right from your browser. For instance, running whois is as easy as typing “whois google.com” in the URL field and hitting enter.

As an example, let’s use whois.domaintools.com for the whois command. Create a bookmark to that URL, but add %s on the end. The %s is replaced by whatever text follows the whois (Here’s a more thorough treatment on keyword shortcuts in Firefox). Set the keyword to whois and you’re good to go.

Here are other shortcuts you might find useful

Alternate whois – http://www.quarkbase.com/show/%s
Geo IP lookup – http://www.ipaddressguide.com/ip2location.aspx?ip=%s
DNS and mail server health – http://www.intodns.com/%s
host – http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=lookup&host=%s
ping – http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=%s