Searching Your Google Bookmarks From Firefox’s URL Field

I was looking for a bookmark of mine on Google Bookmarks a moment ago and did so in a very primitive way — I went to my bookmarks page and typed my query into the search field. Bad form.

Well, it dawned on me that there’s a much better way to do this. After remembering that I use Firefox Quicksearches to make my searching tasks more efficient, I went back to my Google Bookmarks page and simply right-clicked in the search field, elected to create a new quicksearch, and gave it the quicksearch keyword ‘b’. This lets me do this:

b screenshot

…which yields the link on how to take a screenshot in OS X that I saved months ago. The key here is that I just searched all of my own custom bookmarks — all of which I added tags and wrote a description for. This is so powerful because I have already narrowed down what I find interesting within my bookmarks. Now, using this technique, I can search within that highly distilled list of resources directly from the address bar.

So that’s it:

1. Set up Google Bookmarks and import your old stuff.
2. Go to the Google Bookmarks search field and right-click to add a custom keyword.
3. Assign “b” for bookmarks as the shortcut key.

From that point on you’re now searching through your bookmark titles, tags, and descriptions just by typing “b foo” directly from the Firefox URL field.: