Search shortcuts for Firefox

Everyone who has ever used my computer, even for a moment, has taken a particular liking to my search shortcuts — most notably gg, my shortcut to Google.

I'm doing Google searches all the time. Whenever I have a question about anything, I don't hesitate to grab my laptop and look it up on Google. If I had to go to Google.com, wait for the site to load, and click in the search box before I could type in my query and search, it would slow me down.

After reading that, you probably think I'm crazy. But yes, that little bit of extra work would slow me down. I search a lot!

So what is my more efficient solution? It's simple: Firefox bookmark keywords. If you don't understand them, I recommend that you go look at the LifeHacker article about them.

I've published some of my more useful search shortcuts here. Firefox users can simply right-click on the link and choose Bookmark This Link. Then, go into Organize Bookmarks and add keywords to them. I also recommend grouping the search shortcuts into a folder called Search to keep some sanity in the Bookmark menu.

Google Search - keyword: gg
Google Maps - keyword: map
Google Image Search - keyword: img
IMDB Lookup - keyword: imdb
Dictionary - keyword: dc
Thesaurus - keyword: th
Wikipedia - keyword: wiki

After saving the bookmarks, don't forget to add the keywords. The shortcuts are useless without them. Oh, and if you don't use Firefox, you're out of luck.

With the shortcuts, you can now go to the address bar and type gg britney spears to learn everything you want to know about annoying pop singers. But that would be useless.

More useful would be, when you're looking at the web site for a local sushi restaurant and you see their address on the page, you could copy it from the page and paste it into the address bar, typing map before it, so you have something like map 401 N Michigan Ave Chicago. Just a few keystrokes gets you the directions you're looking for.