Firefox is a great browser. One of the things that makes it great is its extendability. There are a lot of wonderful plugin extensions for Firefox, but that’s another show. This post is about the ways you can extend Firefox’s search capabilities.

The Google search field in the top-right corner is a wonderful time saver when doing any sort of medium to heavy surfing. Things that I wouldn’t normally think to search for, I do now, since it’s so easy. I hate that it gives the search results in the current tab instead of a new one, but I can live with that. (I thought I had that working in a previous life, but I can’t seem to replicate that behavior now.)

That field is extendable. Notice the drop-down arrow next to the Google icon. There are some other search engines loaded there, and a link to go get more. In addition to the Google search, I find the searches for [[http://en.wikipedia.org|Wikipedia]], [[http://www.amazon.com|Amazon]], [[http://www.versiontracker.com|Version Tracker (Mac OS X)]], and [[http://www.imdb.com|IMDb]] to be especially helpful.

But there’s more. A lot more. Firefox includes “smart keywords” capability that can be used to search the web right in the location bar. Smart Keywords let you search any website without having to nagivate to the site, type in stuff in the search bar, and click the search button. That can all be avoided, with Firefox.

On any website’s search text field, click with the secondary mouse button (or control-click if you’re on a one-button mac). In the pop up menu that appears, you should see “Add a keyword for this search.” Clicking on that adds a bookmark for the search, with a keyword associated with it. From then on, you can search that site right from the location bar by prefacing your search with your keyword.

Let’s say you spend a lot of time on [[http://wiki.43folders.com|43folders wiki]], and use the search function a lot. It’s easy to add a smart keyword for searching it:

1. in the wiki.43folders.com search field, right-click and select “Add a keyword for this search.”
2. in the dialog that appears, type “43Folders Wiki Search” in the Name field, and something like “43fw” in the keyword field, and click OK. If you want to have a bookmark folder just for your searches, of course you should file it at this time as well.
3. from now on, when you want to search the 43folders wiki, you can just type “43fw whatever” in the location bar, to search the site for “whatever”
4. There’s no step 4. cool, eh?