Firefox Tip

A little Firefox tip that I just discovered. It makes it far easier to use web search interfaces.

Let’s take for example the TV programme search box on the Radio Times web site. It’s nn the left hand side of the page – a little text box labelled “search tv”. Now the usual way to use it would be to type in the name of a TV show that you are interested in and hit the “go” button. But in order to do that you need to get to the RT page first. And that all takes too much time.

So instead of typing something into the text box, point at it with your mouse and right click. One of the options on the menu is “Add a Keyword for the Search”. Select that menu item and you’ll get a dialogue box. Give the search a name (which isn’t really important) and a keyword (this is important) – I suggest ‘rt’. At this point you can also select which bookmark folder to store this search in. I suggest putting it in the “quick searches” folder. After filling all of those details, press the ‘ok’ button to create the search.

Now you don’t need to be on the Radio Times page to search for a programme. At any time you can simply type “rt ” in the Firefox location bar and it will run that search on the Radio Times site for you. For example typing “rt doctor who” will show you all of the times that Doctor Who is on over the next two weeks.

And you can set up the same thing for any site that has a search box like that. I have about half a dozen set up and they save me a lot of time.