Firefox, like all other modern browsers, has this nifty search box from where you can search for stuff from different search engines and websites. Some of the usually available options (in the English version) are Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay etc. While these are usually the websites you’re gonna go looking for anything, they don’t cover everything that you’d be looking for. Maybe you want to search YouTube for a video. Or, maybe you want to look through Scribd for a free book or project. Going to those websites and searching for stuff is a lot more hassle than doing it directly from the search box.
Thankfully, Firefox lets you to easily add search engines from various websites to its search box. For example, to add YouTube search, all you’ve to do is visit youtube.com. Now click the downward pointing arrow on the search box, and then on Add “YouTube Video Search”.
Booyeah! You can now search YouTube directly from Firefox without visiting the website again.
This works for a lot of aggregating sites, like Scribd, Grooveshark, Torrentz, Dailymotion, Hulu, Flickr and so on. Just visit a website and check the search box if the website search can be added to Firefox. Do note that you need to have Firefox 3 or later for the feature to work. The latest Firefox version is 3.6, which you should be running anyway. Download it from here.
In a future post, we shall see how to create keywords for the different search engines that we added, so that we can just totally remove the search box and use the address bar instead.
#Firefox starter tips are a series of useful, small posts that will help a new Firefox user to get the best out of the awesome open source browser.