blue and brown books

If you are still using Internet Explorer, please stop.

Download Firefox or please check out a number of alternative browsers, a second favourite of mine is Opera.

There are pros and cons to any browser. Firefox is infinitely customizable as there are always new developments for its third-party plugins. Unfortunately, this is also its downfall. In order to get the best experience from Firefox, every new install of it needs countless downloads to get to that specific functionality that you are used to. For a work computer, my mom’s computer or any other that is not used (almost) exclusively by me, I would recommend Opera instead, as it has some advanced functionality pre-installed.

However, for Firefox in particular, let’s talk about a little-known, and entirely built-in function called “Quick Search”.

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If you already use Firefox, right now press Cmd+L (Alt+D on PC) type: “google stanford encyclopedia philosophy” in your address bar, and BAM you have google results without ever going to google’s search.

Firefox has google preinstalled as a command, but you can change any search field you come across to a Quick Search.

Right-click the search field for this site at the top corner of the sidebar and select ‘Add a Keyword for this Search…’

A prompt will come up next that looks as though you’ve added a bookmark, name it Blue and Brown Books, and put the keyword as ‘bbb’ like so:

You’ve now saved ‘bbb’ as a Quick Search. Hit Cmd+L (Alt+D on PC) and type “bbb wittgenstein” and BAM you’ve now immediately gone to the search results for the archives on anything that has the word ‘wittgenstein’ in its content.

You can imagine the power of this simple action. Since finding out about this, I’ve put ‘def’ to search dictionary.com, ‘thes’ to search thesaurus.com, ‘wiki’ to search any wikipedia article, ‘imdb’ to search the imdb database, flickr, ebay, etc. The coolest one is ‘maps’ for google maps.

Take a few minutes to surf to all of your frequented sites and really think of some simple and useful keywords for your searches. If you need to find any of them to edit, they all save to the default ‘bookmarks’ folder.

How many times have you wanted to search for… “Grok” on Wikipedia, but found it frustrating to open a new tab, type in the wikipedia URL, wait for it to load, and then type in the “Grok” and wait for your results to come up? It has happened to me many many times. It might not seem like a lot of time, but if you can truly adapt this to the way you think (or ‘Grok’) about using the internet, it just makes sense. Also, I don’t really know why, but I think it’s really cool to find minuscule ways to make my life better in these kind of extremely small and superfluous increments.
Taking now what we know about Firefox’s Quick Searches, and the basic ‘launcher’ notion of Quicksilver, I’ll talk about how to skip the middle-man and use the Quick Search functionality from anywhere at any time with the Quicksilver plugin, and elaborate on these plugins themselves. Grok on!