Cool Firefox Bookmark Feature
May 7, 2005 – 10:50 amI was reading through the book Firefox Hacks a little bit yesterday, and I found a pretty cool bookmark trick that I had not known about. I created a new bookmark to the page http://www.answers.com. After I created the bookmark, I went to the “Bookmarks” menu and then “Manage Bookmarks”. I clicked on the bookmark for answers.com and then clicked the “Properties” button at the top of the screen. I adjusted the bookmark properties so that “http://www.answers.com/%s” was in the “Location” box and “word” was in the “Keyword” box.
After saving out of the menu, I can now open a new tab, type “word nephrology” in the URL area, and wind up seeing this page. Kind of cool.
8 Responses to “Cool Firefox Bookmark Feature”
This is possibly the most useful thing I’ve discovered all week — thanks Jeff!
I’ve set up the keyword “pedia” to go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s.
Anyone else have good ideas for keywords?
By Paul.za on May 7, 2005 at 12:27 pm
Opera has a similar feature. I type ‘g keyword’ and google searches for keyword.
By Kristján on May 7, 2005 at 3:31 pm
Pretty convenient feature, eh? I’ve added one for weather, linking to “http://www.weather.com/weather/local/$s” with the keyword “weather”, so that I can just type “weather 91125″ to get the weather for Pasadena. I imagine that I’ll come up with half a dozen more uses for that little trick in the future for things I check somewhat regularly where the use of a keyword would save me at least one intermediate web page.
By jjk on May 7, 2005 at 3:38 pm
I have suggestion Jeff: Dictionary lookup:
“http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=”
Just tack on a word at the end and it should either take you to the primary definition, or if the word is misspelled or has multiple entries, it will take you to a list of correctly spelled or relevant words.
By Adam on May 8, 2005 at 12:12 am
For people like me who are a little behind the times with the vernacular:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%s
The keyword I use is “slang.”
The others I use (gg for Google, sg for Scholar Google, dict for dictionary.com lookup, wiki for wikipedia) have been mentioned here already…
By Dixie on May 8, 2005 at 12:21 pm
Actually there is a Firefox Search Engine plugin that will do the same. You just click on the search engines box and type in your word or phrase and it opens a new tab. That’s mentioned on the Answers.com download page.
Actually right clicking the icon in the toolbar for Answer.com (if you downloaded the program), and choosing Show Answer bar, will give you another way to enter a word or phrase and have it open in a new tab in Firefox. The answer bar is kind of a cool little device that sits almost hidden along the margin of your screen till you click on it and then it slides out letting you type in your word or phrase.
Mark
By Mark Holmes on May 8, 2005 at 12:42 pm
There was also a comment above about typing in the word weather and the zip code to get results. Google now allows that as well, along with a few other new tools that I mentioned in my blog
Mark
Other wise the link to my blog will look like a bit of gibberish above.
(hope html language works in these posts).
By Mark Holmes on May 8, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Hi Mark. I haven’t downloaded any program from Answers.com; from what I can tell, they don’t offer those programs for Linux (which leaves me in the cold). I did, however, download their search plugin, and that is kind of nice. Unfortunately, I have to move the mouse up to the search toolbar, click on the icon on the left, navigate down to and then select the Answers.com icon. With the keyword bookmark, I can just “Ctrl-t” a new tab and then type “word whatever” and be in business with no mouse movement at all, which is a plus.
I had not seen the Google weather feature before. Nicely done on their part. It looks to me like the advantage of the Google layout is that you get a very easy to see four day forecast immediately, whereas you have to navigate around Weather.com to get more than just today’s forecast. The advantage of Weather.com is the increased information. Interesting to note, though.
And, I checked out your blog, and I quite like it. I’ll spend some more time checking out in the near future.
By jjk on May 8, 2005 at 1:05 pm