nemof.org blog

I know I haven’t updated my blog in a while, life has been hectic. I thought I would share a nice tip for using google+firefox keywords.

I often use ask.metafilter.com however I really dislike yahoo, whom they happen to use as their search engine. Now, it’s not very hard to go to google and type:

<some interesting question> site:ask.metafilter.com

However, this isn’t half as quick as using Firefox Keywords. Perhaps then is it possible to use Keywords and google together, using googles ability to restrict searches   to a given domain?

It’s extremely easy. The best way I could recommend to do this is to go to google, right click in the search area and click ‘add a Keyword for this search…’, name it and decide on the Keyword command. I tend to use abbreviations or acronyms, in this case (a)sk (m)etafilter, "am".

One useful thing to know about Keywords is ‘%s’ substitution. This is what allows us to restrict our ask.mefi query to just their domain. To illustrate:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s+site%3Aask.metafilter.com&btnG=Search

Is the search that is performed if I type "am <some search string here>" into the address bar. However, what would be passed to google would be

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=<some search string here>+site%3Aask.metafilter.com&btnG=Search

The search string being substituted for %s.

Of course the possibilities are endless, and as google is often better than some websites own internal search engines this might well come in useful.