The former method is probably more convenient for most users. Some users however do have a problem with the way the search form keeps the search phrase in its form after the search has been performed. This is a privacy issue for some users who prefer that their previous search is not displayed in the Firefox toolbar.

The Firefox add-on Clear Search offers a solution by cleaning the Firefox search form whenever a search was performed in the web browser. This is also helpful for Linux users using Linux’s highlight and paste shortcut according to the developer of the add-on.

Clear Search is an experimental search add-on that is compatible with all versions of Firefox 3. It can be downloaded and installed from the Mozilla website.

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The shortcut [CTRL F] allows them to search in the active tab but that’s about it. The following article contains three interesting and hopefully useful Firefox tips that improve the local search in the Firefox web browser. Two of the tips are add-ons for the web browser while the last is a setting that provides smoother access to the local search options.

Tip 1: Getting rid of [CTRL F]

The first tip is a basic tip but nonetheless helpful for users who search on pages regularly. Firefox offers an option to start the search on the page immediately without having to press CTRL F first.

Users who want to change to the faster way of searching on a page can do so by opening the Firefox options, switching to the advanced tab in the options and checking the Search for test when I start typing box. It is from then on possible to perform a search on the same page by simply typing the search term.

Tip 2: Search in all open tabs

The Find in tabs add-on provides another interesting search option. It allows Firefox users to search in all open tabs instead of just the active tab. This can be pretty useful for users who do research and have multiple tabs open on the same subject.

Find In Tabs

Tip 3 Smart Find Add-on

The Smart Find add-on adds another interesting option to the Firefox search option. It can find words related to the search phrase which is extremely helpful if words (either the search phrase or the phrase on the website) has been misspelled.

Smart Find

Do you know other tips or Firefox add-ons that improve the local search in the web browser? Let us know in the comments.

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The Drag & DropZones extension for Firefox is different and at the same time very convenient because of the way the searches are initiated. It basically comes down to this. The Firefox screen will be divided up into 12, 36 or 64 squares each containing a so called drop zone which will perform a search or command.

It is up to the user if he wants to work with big drop zones or smaller ones which solely depends on the number of search engines and Firefox commands that he adds to the grid. A search consists of selecting an item on a website, dragging it to the square of the desired search engine or command and dropping it in that square.

The grid is shown when dragging elements around including the favicon and name of the service configured in each grid making identification easy.

Drag & DropZones is providing access to all search engines of the Firefox search bar by default which are all shown in the options and positioned on the grid. New search engines can be added by adding them to the Firefox search bar which would enable them in Drag & DropZones as well. The only way of removing a search engine from the grid is to remove it from the search bar.

Besides adding and configuring search engines it is possible to add commands as well like saving an image, copy the image location or opening the link in a new window. All commands of the right-click context menu are available and can be configured in the grid as well.

The Firefox extension comes with a button that can be placed in a toolbar that can turn the extension on or off.

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Some users would probably prefer a different search behavior. The default search behavior can be changed by editing the search engine in the Firefox options. It is for instance possible to change the search to a normal Google or Yahoo search which would have the effect that the search result list would always be displayed after sending text to the browser that is not in url form.

The search engine can be changed in the Firefox configuration which can be loaded by typing about:config in the address bar. Entering keyword.URL in the filter field will display the responsible parameter.

The value of the parameter contains the Google search string that is responsible for the Browse By Name search. Removing the gfns=1 variable from the query (and one of the & chars) would turn that query into a normal Google search that would display the search results all the time.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=

Changing the search provider from Google to another one is possible as well. The Yahoo url would look like this:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s

It is important to change the search word with the %s replacement to make the search work on other search engines.

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Firefox assumes that all phrases that make use of a period are web addresses and will try to load them. This can be quite frustrating if a user wanted to look up a file name in a search engine. You can test that yourself by entering svchost.exe in the address bar. Firefox will try to load the website svchost.exe even though the .exe domain extension is not existent.

There is no Firefox setting or add-on that can restrict the extensions to the known domain extensions but there is another way to directly saerch for terms with periods in Firefox using the location bar.

All that is needed is to place a “?” before the search term. While a search for svchost.exe would result in a page not found error in Firefox a search for ?svchost.exe would perform the search in the default search engine and deliver the desired result.

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Everyone is constantly searching for information and Firefox users are in the great position to be aided by hundreds of search extensions that make searching easier, comfortable and faster.

To much choice on the other hand puts some pressure back on the user who now has to pick the useful extensions and cast the other that are not helping him aside. That’s where this article comes into play. It lists the Firefox Search Extensions that you need to search the Internet professionally. They help you find the information you are looking for faster and efficiently.

The following list contains useful search plugins that can speed up the information finding process tremendously. No toolbar plugins have been included in the list.

General Search Plugins:

Add to Search Bar – Lots of websites provide search forms which can be used to search the contents of those sites. The Add To Search Bar plugin makes it possible to add those to the list of Firefox search engines so that the search can be conducted from the search function in Firefox.

Advanced URL Builder – Add custom searches to the Firefox right-click menu.

CacheIt! 1.0 – It happens sometimes that a website is not responding. It could be down or moving to another server. CacheIt provides access to cached versions of the page so that the information can be retrieved even if the original website is not responding.

Context Search – Only Google Search is available by default when highlighting a term in Firefox. This plugin adds additional search engine options to the menu so that the user can perform searches on Yahoo, Amazon or eBay.

Cooliris – Formerly Piclens. Provides 3D browsing for Image and Videos searches. Creates stunning effects.

CyberSearch – Supercharges the Firefox 3 Location Bar with search results that appear instantly. Perform searches in the location bar without having to open a search engine.

Dict – Look up Word definitions of highlighted words by right-clicking them and selecting the appropriate action.

Find In Tabs – Perform searches among multiple tabs. This works pretty well in conjuction with the MultiSearch plugin.

HighlightAll – Pressing Control F in Firefox opens a search form that allows the user to search on the active page. Highlight All highlights all occurrences of the search term on the page making it easier to find them.

Interclue – Find out what’s behind a search result before clicking the link.

MultiSearch – Ever wanted to search for multiple search terms at once? MultiSearch steps in and makes that possible. Just enter search terms and a comma delimiter to open search results for each of the terms in individual tabs. The terms Firefox, Mozilla, Thunderbird would open three tabs each displaying search results for one of the terms.

Search Keys 0.8.1 – Search Keys adds keyboard navigation to search results pages of Google, Yahoo and Delicious. Instead of clicking on a search term the user can press the assigned number on his keyboard to open the website. This makes it possible to perform a search and open results without using the mouse at all.

Searchbar Autosizer – Automatically resizes and clears the searchbar. Can also revert back to the default search engine. Useful add-on for minimalistic Firefox themes.

Surf Canyon – Search Engine Assistant – A search assistant that automatically recommends and ranks search results based on the users choice. It can pull data from search results pages that are currently not shown to the user.

Who Is This Person? – Highlight a name on a webpage and search for information about that person on sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google News.

Site Specific Search Plugins:

Bug.gd Error Search – Bug.gd is a user driven website that contains a huge database of errors and solutions. This search plugin adds the error search to Firefox.

Coogle – Highlights the search phrase on websites that have been discovered by searching on Google.com.

Customize Google – Removes unwanted information like ads from Google search results and adds additional useful information like search options on other search engines to it.

Delicious Bookmarks – Keeps the Bookmarks of Delicious and Firefox in sync.

GooglePreview – Adds thumbnail previews of the websites in the search results.

Locator – Locates highlighted addresses on Google Maps.

Webmaster Specific Search Plugins:

SearchStatus – Displays a wealth of information about the current website in the statusbar. This includes the Google Pagerank and Alexarank. Provides Link Reports, whois search, keyword density and nofollow link options among others.

SEOQuake – A useful extensions for webmasters who want to optimize their pages for various search engines.

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The extension is only available for Firefox 3 and the best Firefox 2 users can get at the moment is the extension Peers. Peers (which I discovered at Cybernet News) adds the same principle to the right search form. It displays the first seven Google or Yahoo search results beneath the entered search term in real time.

A left-click loads the search result in the active tab while a middle-click opens it in a new one. The right-click menu is not accessible in that form.

The number of search results that are displayed can be changed from 0-10 which is the same range for search engines that are displayed beneath the results and the amount of search suggestions. The maximum is therefor 30 items divided equally among suggestions, search results, and search engines.

The compact display has one disadvantage. If the websites displayed have long titles the url will not be fully displayed. I always check the url before I click it which makes Peers for my purposes not that practical. The author should probably consider using two lines to display the contents or use additional horizontal space if that is possible.

Peers is not compatible to Firefox 3 by default. If you follow the tip posted in my Awesome Search article you can make it compatible though.

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The new Awesome Bar looks into the history and bookmarks by default when the user begins to type in the first letter of an url. It even remembers previous selections and sorts them accordingly. One thing that is missing though is direct web search from that bar, and that is what Awesome Search provides.

You can enter any term in that bar and the add-on will perform a Google search for that term adding to the results found. Google results will have the Google icon while results from the history or bookmarks will feature a star.

Apparently an Amazon search was also added which I do not find that useful but since it’s version 0.0.1 of the add-on it’s understandable that not all features have been implemented yet.

Dark Kosmos has created a screencast of the bar in action which can be accessed by following this link. I had some troubles getting this add-on to work in Firefox 3 RC1 portable. It did work after disabling the compatibility check. To do that type about:config in the address bar, right-click and select New -> Boolean. Enter extensions.checkCompatibility and select the value false.

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