Use keywords to access pages of a website faster
If you visit a website regularly, you may have added it to your bookmarks, or it may appear in the address bar suggestions list when you start typing its name, or on the new tab page. While that is great if you are always using the same entry point, say the homepage of the website, you sometimes may want to go to a different page.
If you take Reddit as an example: while you can go to the homepage to get a mixture of new posts based either on general popularity on Reddit or your own preferences, if you are a member, you may sometimes want to go directly to subreddits such as /r/firefox/ or /r/android/ either to browse contents or post a new message or link there.
It is certainly possible to open the main page and go to the subreddit later, or change the homepage url to that of the subreddit, or even enter it directly.
Some browsers enable you to speed things up a little bit with so called keywords. Keywords are assigned to bookmarks so that you can use them to trigger whatever the bookmark does. You can assign the keyword r to Reddit for example and go to Reddit by typing r and hitting the enter key.
Keywords most of the time are used to quickly access a specific address, or to power searches so that you can enter the keyword followed by the search term to run a search on the selected site.
Tip: If you want to find out more about keyword searches in Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome, check this out. Chrome supports keywords only for searches, not for bookmarks.
I'm going to show you how you can access pages on sites such as Reddit or Imgur, and any other website that uses the same structure for its subpages without searching.
Keyword Tips
Lets use Firefox for this example. Here is what you need to do:
- Open the Bookmarks Manager in the browser using Ctrl-Shift-B. It opens in a separate window.
- Right-click a location under All Bookmarks on the left, for instance the Bookmarks Toolbar or any location in the Bookmarks Menu, and select New Bookmark.
- Enter any descriptive name for the bookmark, e.g. Reddit Jump
- In the location field, type http://www.reddit.com/r/%s
- In the keyword field, type r or any other letter or combination that is not used yet as a keyword, e.g. re
The location requires a bit of explanation. The %s at the end of the url is a placeholder. Whenever you use the keyword to open a page on Reddit, what you enter after the keyword will replace it.
So, if you type "r firefox" you are taken to http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox.
You can use the same structure for imgur.com as you can see on the screenshot above.
What more? Reddit and Imgur support multi-reddits, so that you can use something like "r firefox+android" to display the Firefox and Android reddits mixed together on the page.
Now Read: Use keywords to search faster in Firefox
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Very handy tip.
I used them when “classic” Opera was my primary browser.
I was searching for how to do this, like with the twitter extension where you can load accounts just by typing ‘@’. Thanks a lot.