What\’s in your Firefox search bar?

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.

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on December 29, 2006 at 6:00 pm and filed under Resources. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

6 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

how do i add scroogle to the search bar?

[Reply]

1. splak on April 12th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
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.

[Reply]

2. Barry on January 4th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
One I have is YubNub, which provides a nice command-line-like interface to bunches of web services:

http://yubnub.org/

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3. Jason Lefkowitz on January 3rd, 2007 at 9:13 am
thx for the icerocket.com mention and use. If you ever have any suggestions or ideas, let me know !

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4. mark cuban on December 30th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
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.

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5. B.D. on December 30th, 2006 at 11:04 am
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.

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6. Derek Rogerson on December 29th, 2006 at 8:38 pm