Search
|
| Here’s what I have in my Firefox search bar. What’s in yours? |
One of my favorite features of Firefox is the search bar to which you can add search tools that you use frequently. That way, you don’t have to visit the search tool’s site in order to perform a search. It’s a time-saver.
At the left is a screenshot of my Firefox search bar. I have it mainly in alphabetical order, except for Google at the top. You can find all of these tools at MyCroft. From my master list, here are the tools I find myself using at least daily:
- Google search: Well, that’s self-evident. I’m about as dependent as anyone on this 800-lb gorilla.
- Icerocket: My personal favorite blog search engine. I find it returns more targeted results and less spam than Technorat.
- Technorati: But yeah, I search Technorati regularly too, usually after Icerocket.
- My Furl archive: I’m a huge fan of the searchable, taggable, sharable personal archiving service Furl. One of my readers, Christian Spannagel, created this nifty tool that allows me to search only my Furl archive directly from my Firefox search bar. (Get this tool)
- Flickr CC tags: Often for my work with Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits and other projects I like to illustrate posts with relevant Creative Commons-licensed imaged posted by Flickr Users. This tool lets me find those images directly from Firefox.
- Wikipedia: When some new topic, event, or person crossed my mental radar screen, I usually do a quick Wikipedia check to gain some basic context.
So those are a few of my must-have Firefox search bar plugins. What’s in yours? Please comment below.
Hi Amy, have you tried the CustomizeGoogle for Firefox extension? It adds search links to Google competitors (among other things) and I find myself using it quite often. Another handy search resource.
I have several. Amazon.com – music, Powell’s Books, Scroogle, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Sourceforge, Food Network, NewEgg.com, and PirateBay. The last 2 I use rarely. Most of the others get used quite a bit.
thx for the icerocket.com mention and use. If you ever have any suggestions or ideas, let me know !
One I have is YubNub, which provides a nice command-line-like interface to bunches of web services:
http://yubnub.org/
I’ve been using Blingo (http://www.blingo.com) for a while now because it gives you chances to win stuff like movie tickets and iPods on every search. I finally won a Fandango pass the other day, so it does work.
The search results ostensibly use a Google engine, but when doing the same search in both sites, Google shows better returns. However, what I get from Blingo is still comprehensive and I almost always find what I’m looking for there.
how do i add scroogle to the search bar?