I’m often asked why I think so much of Quicksilver, and why it’s always part of my pitch when I’m trying to get someone to move to OS X. The reasons are legion, but if I had to pick one it’d be how I use Quicksliver to perform web searches. I show how I use them here in this short screencast.
As the title suggests, I use a combination of Quicksilver and Quicksearches. You need two things to get started:
- A number of Quicksearches in Safari
- Quicksilver’s Safari plugin enabled
From there you simply invoke your searches from Quicksilver by typing the name of the Quicksearch bookmark (see the video). I name all of mine “$SITE Quicksearch” to make it easy. Here are a few suggestions:
- Amazon
- Wikipedia
- Dictionary
- Thesaurus
- Pronunciations
You can also configure some more interesting searches like these:
- Search your own website by searching Google for site:yoursite.com $TERM
- Search your Google or Delicious bookmarks
- Search Twitter (the most current of current news on a topic)
If you’re an OS X user and you’re not using Quicksilver Quicksearches, you should strongly consider incorporating them into your system. ::
