One of the more overlooked features of the Firefox browser is "keymarks". Essentially, these are special kinds of bookmarks that allow you to slip in a string as part of the bookmarked URL. This allows you to often jump right to a dynamically generated page, rather than going through some landing page first.
Creating a keymark is easy enough: when the search uses an HTTP GET command, you can just bookmark the result of a search and then modify the URL in the keymark.
As an example, let's say you're tired of going to the www.ebay.com homepage every time you want to search for the latest must-have product. Creating a keymark is easy:
- First, point Firefox to the search page itself (www.ebay.com).
- Next, run a sample search. It doesn't really matter what you search on.
- Save the resulting page as a bookmark. Give it a nice name like "eBay Search". I put all my keymarks in the same folder to distinguish them from "regular" bookmarks.
- Now edit the bookmark (Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks, right click on the bookmark and select "Properties").
- Find the search term you searched for in the Location field, and replace it with "%s" (without the quotes). In my example, the URL used for the search was "http://search.ebay.com/nationals-tickets_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8". I found that I could just change the URL to http://search.ebay.com/%s.
- In the Keyword field, give the keymark a name for how you will call it in the URL. For my eBay search, I just entered "ebay" so I can just type "ebay [product]" in the URL.
- Click on OK, and you are done!
Now, when you want to search for something on eBay, just go the URL and type "ebay [product]" and hit return, and you're there!
It's a little tougher to create a keymark when the search uses an HTTP POST command, but in Firefox you can use the Tools->Page Info on the search page to figure out what the form fields are, and almost always the web server will accept GET the same as POST.
Here's some of my keymarks that make my web browsing more efficient:
| Keyword | Location | Comments | |
| g | [link] |
Google search, without needing to go to the Google home page. No need for a separate search field on my toolbar, either. |
|
| go | [link] | Same as previous, but it does the "I feel lucky" so I go directly to the first match. | |
| wiki | [link] | Search Wikipedia. A one-step reference on any topic. | |
| dict | [link] | Dictionary search, for when I don't know what a word means. | |
| imdb | [link] | Quickly search for an IMDB movie or actor. | |
| ebay | [link] | Ebay search. | |
| sp-en | [link] | Translate some text from English to Spanish. | |
| en-sp | [link] | Same thing, but Spanish to English. | |
| bp | [link] | Look up a book in bookpool.com. | |
| news | [link] | See if there's been any recent news on something using Google News. | |
| images | [link] | Search Google's image listings for a picture. | |
| map | [link] | Jump right to a Google Map. Just use "map [some address]". | |
| encarta | [link] | Search Encarta for an entry (similar to the wikipedia search). | |
| jd | [link] | Search javadocs for a Java class. |
By the way, has everyone tried http://www.flashearth.com? Warning -- You need a fast internet connection, but it's pretty amazing.
Comments
i dont use them. its funny, never heard before about...
Yes, Rick, Keymarks are wonderful. This is just another example of why Firefox is simply a better browser – regardless of one's feelings regarding the competition.
I really wanted to comment on Flash Earth, though. I love this stuff! While this takes Google Maps a huge step forward, it’s got nothing on Google Earth. I assume many folks are now familiar with Google Earth but to me, it still ranks up there with the all time best free application software. The guys at Google keep going too. Has anyone checked out SketchUp, the new free 3-D Modeling tool?
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