Cool Mozila Firefoxl Trick: Wildcard Bookmark Shortcuts

Via Bob Ducharme at O'Reilly Weblogs: Mozilla Firefox can assign a "Keyword" to a bookmark. You can enter that keyword into the navigation bar as a shortcut that will take you to the bookmarked site. Pretty cool, especially for keyboard addicts, but not really all that special. This really becomes interesting, however if you bookmark a search result page then turn the bookmark into a wildcard so you can execute similar searches using a simple command in the navigation bar.

For example, go to the Lotus Support search page, http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/support/, select the "Technote" radio button, enter a simple search term -- I used "spam" -- and execute the search. Bookmark the page, then bring up the bookmark sidebar, find the bookmark, right click on it, and bring up the properties dialog. Enter a brief mnemonic in the Keyword field -- I used "tn". Then scroll the location field until you find your seach term, replace it with "%s", and OK the properties dialog. Enter your mnemonic and a new search term in the navigation bar, and voila!

The technique will work for any search page that uses the URL to pass the query. It can be used for lots of other things, too. For example, open up www.openntf.org select a project from the drop-down. Bookmark the project, open the properties, assign a keyword, and replace the project name with "%s". Now you have a quick shortcut for opening up any Open NTF project overview page.