Firefox Keyword Searches

Roman was asking me if there was a way to add keyword searches to Firefox in a similar manner that Opera allowed it to do. Keyword searches perform searches by typing a selected keyword and a search term. A default keyword search in Firefox is “wp keyword”, e.g. “wp firefox” to search Wikipedia for the search term Firefox. Those keyword searches are entered in the Firefox address bar.

Five default keyword searches are enabled in Firefox, they are: “google”, “wp”, “dict”, “slang” and “quote”. This means you can search Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, the Urban Dictionary and a Stock Symbol Search. It’s not complicated to add your own keyword searches to Firefox, all you need to do is add a search results page to the Firefox Bookmarks and edit this bookmark afterwards.

You need to replace the search term with %s and add a keyword to the search. Lets take my website search as an example. Type in a search term and press search. The url of the result should appear like this: http://www.ghacks.net/?s=firefox. Bookmark that page and go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks afterwards.

Right-click the newly created bookmark and select Properties from the menu. Now replace firefox with %s so that you get http://www.ghacks.net/?s=%s as the new location of the bookmark.

Now enter a keyword for the search, for example “g” without the “” obviously. You can now search my website by simply entering “g search term” in the Firefox address bar.

This only works with websites and search boxes that have the search term in the url of the results.