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

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 delicious page and simply right-clicked in the search field, elected to create a new quicksearch, and gave it the quicksearch keyword ‘d’. This lets me do this:

d screenshot

…which yields the link on how to take a screenshot in OS X. 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 on my delicious page. Now, using this technique, I can search within that highly distilled list of resources directly from the address bar.

It Gets Crazier

While searching my own links is likely to be most useful, a friend of mine and I instantly realized that this should be extended to the uber-powerful ability to search the delicious/tags option. This, for anyone not familiar, let’s you search for results bearing a particular tag name, i.e. dogs, pictures, etc.

The thing that makes this so powerful is the ability to combine tags to really bring out specific results. You can search for programming+xml, for example, and get back a list of results that have both the programming AND xml tags applied across the entire delicious userbase. Very cool stuff.

Well, let’s add a quicksearch for this functionality and make it possible to yield this godlike power directly from the Firefox address bar. First, go to the delicious tags page. Then right-click in that search field and create another quicksearch. I gave mine the dt keyword. This lets us do this:

dt linux security

Uber-sick. You can, of course, combine tags for searches within your own links using this same method, like so:

d programming css

It’s quite powerful and I’m sure I’ll use it almost every day. Hopefully someone else will get some use out of it as well.