I'm feeling smrtr
Somebody
help me out here. When I am using the FireFox browser, I can just type
"amazon" and the search terms on the location textfield, and the
browser will perform the Amazon search and go directly to the result
page. The exact same technique works with Wikipedia. However, this
doesn't seem to work with Google (and thus eliminate the need for
Google toolbar from eating up monitor's real estate), nor any kind of
dictionary lookup. What do I need to type on the address field to
perform a Google search?
Oh crap, now I just got it: if you just type the search words on the location textfield, you go to the page that is the first Google search result for those words. And Amazon and Wikipedia searches are just special cases of this rule. Quite handy! But while we are at it, there is still room for improvement. If you only type in one word, FireFox first tries to look it up as an URL, even though it is obviously malformed and cannot work, and when the lookup fails, goes to Google search. A little bit of machine intelligence here would save a few seconds of user time. If you type in several words, this lookup doesn't seem to happen, but the transition to the target page seems to be immediate.
Somebody, probably Tog (yes, it is bug number 6 at "Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs"), once proposed that this technique could be used to get rid of URLs altogether, so that each site could register a set of words that would take the user to their site. I guess this has happened now, in a sense.
Oh crap, now I just got it: if you just type the search words on the location textfield, you go to the page that is the first Google search result for those words. And Amazon and Wikipedia searches are just special cases of this rule. Quite handy! But while we are at it, there is still room for improvement. If you only type in one word, FireFox first tries to look it up as an URL, even though it is obviously malformed and cannot work, and when the lookup fails, goes to Google search. A little bit of machine intelligence here would save a few seconds of user time. If you type in several words, this lookup doesn't seem to happen, but the transition to the target page seems to be immediate.
Somebody, probably Tog (yes, it is bug number 6 at "Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs"), once proposed that this technique could be used to get rid of URLs altogether, so that each site could register a set of words that would take the user to their site. I guess this has happened now, in a sense.
In Firefox, you can create bookmarks that define shortcuts for a Google search (or anything else for that matter).
Create a new bookmark and set the following fields:
Location: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s
Keyword: g
Then, to do a Google search, type in the URL bar 'g' followed by your search terms, like this:
g any search words you like
Posted by Anonymous | 4:56 AM
Awright!
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 10:31 AM