James Somers posted yesterday about Firefox’s Google search integration. In summary, he suggests that you change your search bar (shortcut Ctrl/Cmd+K, for Win/Mac) to point to something else—say, Wikipedia—and let Firefox’s address bar (Ctrl/Cmd+L) take you directly to Google for searching.
Before I continue, let me add that I’ve been doing something along the lines of what I’m about to show you for a long time now—none of this is particularly new functionality.
My setup is a bit different to James’—I actually never use the Firefox search box, and so I hide it (Right Click > Customize…). I’ve seen a lot of people get a little confused when they try to search something on Wikipedia, for example, on my browser, but I find this makes my life much simpler.
I find myself regularly searching on a wide variety of websites besides Google. I daily search Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Rotten Tomatoes, Wolfram Alpha, YouTube and Google Books (to name a few). In doing so with a search bar, I find myself constantly changing the engine (which can be changed by Ctrl/Cmd+Up or Down when the search box is highlighted) and wasting time. Instead, I use search engine keywords (click the search engine selection button and hit Manage). Once I’ve got the keywords set up, I hide the search box.
Now, I hit Cmd+L to activate the address bar1, and then type (to search Rotten Tomatoes, for example) r district 9. It’s quite simple: [keyword] [search term]. So to search any engine in Firefox, it’s three (if you use one-letter keywords) keystrokes: Cmd+L, w and [space]. That’s not bad.
Here’s the catch—and in my opinion, the biggest flaw with James’ method. Like me, you’ll probably use Google most often, and those extra two keystrokes (g and [space]) will probably begin to add up over time. Firefox has the cool feature of letting you just type in the address bar, hitting [enter] and instantly searching Google, but for whatever reason, this sometimes takes you to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” result, and sometimes not. I’m not sure how or why it’s decided, but it seems arbitrary2. Google is good, but not close to good enough for me to trust Mozilla’s sending me directly to a result on a whim.
The solution is about:config. Look for the keyworld.URL parameter and change it to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=. The btnG=Google query string dictates here that we are going to be using a standard search and not I’m Feeling Lucky.
This pretty much solved most of my search related problems. I have a cleaner browser with less chrome, and I’m more efficient overall at using it. In fact, this feature is essentially the only reason I use Firefox and not any other Mac browser. I am reasonably extension-free, so I could happily switch to any browser that offered me this exact functionality and customization.
Let me know how this works for you, or if you can replicate this on any other good Mac browser.