did you know that if you type something into the firefox address bar and just hit return, it will take you to the top google link for whatever you type?

so it’s basically a shortcut to i’m feeling lucky.

i discovered this when i was starting to type in snowedin.net/planetinfo, of which i usually just type the first few letters, and then pick from the dropdown menu.

i guess this time i didn’t get into the dropdown menu, though, and just hit enter after typing “sn”

i was directed to this lovely informational site about the mineral tin, for which sn is the two-letter periodic table abbreviation.

i thought that i had potentially discovered some weird element lookup easter egg, so i typed in “ag” (which is silver), and got The Assemblies of God, and “au” (which is gold), and got the African Union.

those are not minerals.

acting on a hunch, i did the same searches in google, and sure enough, those are the top hits for those searches (after the stock information that it pops up automatically now).

i think that this disagrees slightly with something david told me a couple of weeks ago that i had kind of forgotten, which is that firefox does a google search for you if you type in the address bar, making the separate google search bar somewhat moot.

but maybe i misheard him.

in which case, i apologize. :)

it reminds me, though, of the rest of what i learned in that conversation with david, which is that you can type “wp ____” into the address bar and it will search wikipedia for you, or “az ____” and it will search amazon.

these both do indeed seem to work as well.

a quick old-fashioned google search on “firefox address bar shortcuts” brings us this informative lifehacker article explaining that this is the manifestation of the “quick searches” feature, accessible via your bookmarks menu, and you can make your own by right-clicking in any search box anywhere and entering in a shortcut phrase. they give a list of suggested ones, and even let you download a little bookmarks file of their favorites if you don’t want to do all that typing.

neat

i must say, however, that in some ways this discovery just put a bit more of the fear of google in me (like the fear of god – it’s kind of fear, but it’s also just… awe), because there is a point at which putting in other quicksearches is silly, because the google quicksearch encompasses them all.

just as i currently search wikipedia by googling “wikipedia ____” (because it’s faster than the wikipedia search and involves fewer steps), you could mimic other searches simply by naming them in the google search, which may or may not be easier than going through the trouble of making and remembering a separate quicksearch.

as further evidence to support this claim, i offer this: after learning where the quick searches were stored, i went and looked at them, and it turns out that the amazon quicksearch isn’t actually installed by default. but the “az ____” shortcut that david mentioned, that i gave you above? it still usually works. because if you google “az _____” amazon is often the first hit.

glory be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 2:01 pm and is filed under links, web commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.