Firefox quick search trick

This is a great time-saving trick that works in Firefox but not in Internet Explorer.  Do you find that there is a particular website that you visit regularly and search for something within that site?  Maybe you go to imdb.com and search for an actor or movie name, or you visit Facebook and search for a friend’s name.  Today I will show you how to really speed up that procedure.

For this example, I will use my website.  If you look in the top right area, you will see that there is a search box:

If you ever want to find an old blog post, just type a related word in that search box and hit “Go”, and you will see a list of my past blogs that include that word.  It’s pretty handy.

If you use Firefox, you can do that search in fewer steps, and without even having to go to my website first.  Here’s how:

1. Go to my site and in that search box, do a right-click.  In the menu that pops up, choose “Add a keyword for this search”.

2. That brings up this window:
3. In the “Keyword” field, type the word “tip” and click Save.

That’s all you need to do to set this up.  With this done, here is how you do a quick search for one of my past tips.  Let’s say you want to find my past tips about Gmail.  With Firefox open (at any website, it doesn’t have to be mine), hit the F6 button and then type:  tip gmail and hit Enter

(With that procedure I threw in another shortcut – the F6 key. When you hit F6, it highlights the address bar in your web browser. That’s a bonus tip at no extra charge :)

So did you see what happened there? No matter what website you are viewing at the moment, F6 highlights the address bar, then “tip gmail” tells Firefox to search my site for posts that contain the word “Gmail”.

You can do this with any website that has the Search function.