Open Hatch

Posts Tagged ‘address bar’

I was just fiddling with the search toolbar and searching from the address bar in Firefox. Somehow I ran into pages detailing how to alter the search behavior of the search bar in firefox so that it doesn’t automatically direct you to google’s “lucky” (#1 ranked) result of whatever you type. (I think that default behavior is presumptuous and annoying.) I also [update 11-10 blah blah blah blah I'm coming back to this and not even reading everything in my own entry, but here it is anyway:] show

Here’s how (copied from that page and updated with my instructions to set it to search via scroogle, with or without SSL). To do it without SSL:

1. At Firefox address bar, enter about:config and press ENTER.
2. At Filter: field, type keyword.url
3. You should see a Preference name of keyword.URL in the list. Double click it, a “Enter String Value” input box will appear.
4. Replace the string with:

http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi/search?q=

If you want SSL (so that the search itself is impossibly obfuscated to any eavesdropping intermediary), just ad an s to http (https), so that this is the URL to enter in step four:

https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi/search?q=

The real practical application of this may be limited, but it pleases my inner nerd

Modifying address bar behavior aside, I do think adding different search engines to the search toolbar is very practical. There are many varieties of information (and scenarios for their use) where the findings of a ranking algorithm are not ideal. To that end, here is a page that will lead you to any (or many) links you choose, which will add useful search engines to your search toolbar (not only to Firefox, but to unrelated browsers as well, I think!). And here is an associated (very cool!) Firefox add-onn that will add the search capability of any web site to your search toolbar; so that you can skip navigating to that site’s search tool, and just search from the toolbar.