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.

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.