Adding MSN Search and Technorati Quicksearches To Firefox

February 03, 2005

One of the coolest things in Firefox is its ability to do Google searches via the address bar; I use this all day long.

This is done simply by, in my case, typing:g searchterm** I changed the prefix from “gg” to “g”.

So if I am looking for some Gentoo information related to Postfix, I can type:g gentoo postfix

Well, with the launch of MSN’s new search engine, and my recent discovery of Technorati – A Blog Search Tool, I decided to spend the 15 seconds required to add this same functionality for them into Firefox. Here’s how:

Create a new bookmark in Firefox.
For the URL, add the text below for MSN:“http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%s&FORM=QBRE”
For the prefix, add “m” (or whatever you want to use).
Create another bookmark.
Add this for the URL:“http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=%s”
Use “t” for the prefix (or whatever you want to use).

That’s it. Now, when you want to search Google, type Control-L to take you to the address bar, and then: g searchterm(s)

To search MSN, do the same but type:m searchterm(s)

To search a topic being blogged about:t searchterms(s)

I also have one set up to search dictionary.com using “d”:d searchterm(s)

Hope you get as much out of these as I do…