Cyde Weys Musings

This post concerns a feature released in Firefox 2.0 that is very useful, but that few people know about. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to use it. Before we begin, you’re going to need Firefox 2.0, which you can obtain for free. It’s definitely a recommended upgrade over Internet Explorer.

In this tutorial we’re going to create a search keyword for Wikipedia. Whenever you want to see Wikipedia’s entry on any topic, just type “wiki topic name” into your address bar (where web addresses normally go) and hit enter. For instance, typing in “wiki World War II” will bring up the article on World War II. This will work as soon as the tutorial is finished.

First, go to Wikipedia. Right-click on the search box in the left pane and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”

Now, give the bookmark a name (”English Wikipedia” is fine) and choose the search keyword. This tutorial uses “wiki”, but if you use Wikipedia a lot and don’t want to have to type four letters each time just to get to a Wikipedia entry, you could just go with a single letter such as “w”.

The search keyword is now created. Try typing “wiki United States” into your address bar to see that it correctly finds articles. If you’re interested in more details on how this works, open up your bookmarks menu, right-click on the new bookmark, and select properties. You will see this:

Sorry that the URL is kind of cut off in the image; it’s supposed to be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

Keyword has its own field; this is the keyword typed into the address bar to trigger the bookmark. The Location field, using the special characters %s, appends what you type into the address bar after the keyword onto the search URL for Wikipedia. This is slightly sub-optimal. If you know the exact name of an article (or are good enough at guessing that you can reliably find redirects), it makes sense to change the URL to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s This way you won’t have to go through Wikipedia’s search each time to find an article; you will go directly there. This is what I use.

Also, this feature can be used for any site that has a search box. Are you a movie buff? It might make sense to enter a search keyword for IMDB.

And that’s all there is to it!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 10:31 and is filed under Net. Keywords: Tags: Firefox, IMDB, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, search keyword, tutorial, Wikipedia. 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.