In response to an earlier post in this series, fellow editor Keir Thomas commented:
“What would be useful is to be able to have two search boxes. One could be set to search one engine, the other to search a different one. I search Amazon pretty much all day long and usually have to go straight to Amazon home page to search.”
While adding another search box would require a fair amount of work, there’s an acceptable alternative that’s easy to configure. By default, Firefox will send any keywords you enter into the address bar to Google’s “Feeling Lucky” search feature, which simply redirects you to the first page found matching those keywords. However you can change this to whatever search destination you please. To do so, follow these steps:
- Enter about:config into the address bar. This will load a list of Firefox configuration settings.
- Filter the list for keyword.URL
- Modify the URL value accordingly. For instance, if you want the keyword you enter to be passed to dictionary.com, enter the URL http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=. If you want to go directly to the Amazon.com page for a particular ISBN, use http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/.
The result is that the keyword is tacked onto the end of whatever URL you specify.
Jason
Sep 19, 10:32 am
Cool tip – thanks!
I’ve hacked it a little. I started by deconstructing the URL that Amazon returns with search results, when you search from its home page.
If you type
http://amazon.com/s/ref=br_ss_hs/104-8446596-5112741?platform
=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=
into your browser address bar, and follow it by the book title (even including spaces), Amazon’s engine will then search for the book and show the usual search results page. This works even if you do so from a non-Amazon page, such as about:blank.
By using this URL as the Firefox keyword value in the instructions above, you have a pretty neat way of searching for ISBNs, author names, book titles, and more, all from a blank Firefox address bar. :)