How to Add Custom Quick Searches to Firefox

Do you want to be able to search any website through the Mozilla Firefox quickly and easily? Firefox is a far more versatile web browser than most users realize. As part of its many customizable functions, Firefox also allows users to create their own custom keyword searches by utilizing its Bookmark function. This will allow you to search any website you want by simply using the Firefox address bar rather than having to navigate to the website.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Computer (PC or Mac)
• Mozilla Firefox web browser (version 2.0 or higher)

1. Open the Mozilla Firefox web browser and navigate to a website with a search function. Ideally this will be a website that you frequent and search a lot. This can be any website from an online retailer, research index, wiki, news website or even a video site, as long as the website has a search feature.

2. Locate the search box on the website. This is the dialog box that you type into whenever you want to search the website for a specific term. For most websites, the search dialog will be very clearly and prominently displayed on the front or main page.

3. Right click in the search dialog box and a context menu will open in Firefox. Inside of this menu click on “Add a Keyword for this Search.”

4. The “Add Bookmark” menu will open in Firefox. Inside of this menu under “Name:” You can name the search whatever you want. The easiest thing to do would just be to use the same name as the website that you will search with this bookmark.

5. Under “Keyword” assign the keyword for the search. This will be what you will type into the Firefox address bar to perform this search. It can be an entire word or a single character. Choose something simple that you will easily remember and associate with the website.

6. Under “Create In:” it is recommended that you select “Bookmarks Menu” as opposed to “Bookmarks Toolbar” as this will create an actual bookmark entry in Firefox and if you make enough of these searches you will clutter up your bookmark toolbar unnecessarily.

7. Click “Add” And you’re done!Now whenever you want to search the website in question you only need to type the keyword followed by the search term. For example, let’s say you want to search a website and have assigned the character “x” as the keyword for that website’s bookmark. You will only need to type x followed by a search term to search the site. If you want to search for “cake recipe” for example you only need to type “x cake recipe” and Firefox will automatically take you to the search results on that site. The same applies with longer keywords as well. If you assign a website the keyword “search” for example and want to search for “cake recipe” you would type “search cake recipe” into the address bar. This will work no matter what website you are on. And again, this feature will work with any searchable website