Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988

Add search engines to your browser

If you're a Firefox user (or IE7 I'm told), you can search YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Amazon, IMDb, several dictionaries, and even the global Whois database directly from Firefox by installing simple add-on extensions.

"Search box add-ons" are not to be confused with "toolbars," which — while sometimes useful — generally add more functionality than just search, and also insert a new horizontal bar into your browser's chrome. I prefer to keep my Firefox chrome pretty clean and rarely use toolbars.

Many search box additions are available directly through Mozilla's Add-Ons section. Many other useful ones aren't listed on Mozilla.org, but they are available out on the Internet, if you know where to look for them. They can be pretty hard to locate sometimes, so here's a list of where to locate some of my favorites that I couldn't find on Mozilla.org:

• YouTube
• The Free Dictionary
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• DomainTools
• Yelp
• LinkedIn
• Spock
• GoDaddy

And here's a great long list of other ones.

Tip: By selecting "Manage Search Engines..." at the bottom of the pulldown (see screenshot), you can also organize the list so your more important sites appear at the top.

What's in your Firefox search bar?
Got a good one to share? Let me know by leaving a comment.

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Labels: browsers, Firefox, how-to, search, tech

Posted by espd at 12:07 PM | 
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