Wow. This cool Firefox feature has been around since 2005, but I just found out about it a few months ago! I swear I haven’t been living in a cave all this time. So if you’re like me and don’t know about this yet, listen up: In Firefox, you can bookmark a search with a keyword, and then use that keyword in your URL entry field. As this article shows, you right-click on the input field and select “Add a Keyword for this Search.” This will allow you to bookmark the search and add a keyword. I usually use two letter keywords like ‘we’ for weather.com and ‘im’ for imdb.com.
In the case of ‘im,’ I first manually went to the imdb.com site and looked for the search form at the top of the page. I right-clicked on the input field, and selected ‘im’ as the keyword for that search. So now, whenever I want to look up something on imdb, all I have to do is hit ‘Cmd-L’ on my Mac to shift focus to the URL bar, enter ‘im’ followed by the query string and then hit enter. Then I’m taken directly to the search results page. It saves me from having to navigate to imdb.com first. It works really well for all kinds of searches, including CPAN, Wikipedia and Weather.com.
I can’t believe I wasn’t aware of this shortcut all this time :)
Adding a Keyword to the CPAN Search Box
Entering the Keyword
Adding a Keyword to the CPAN Search Box