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September 3, 2007
Tech: Firefox Search Hotkey
Pardon the geek-ish digression, but I just discovered something highly useful. While I constantly use Firefox's built-in search bar, I generally mouse my way there, which is irritating for a keyboard-fetishist like me. What's more, once there I never use the sub-searches available, like Google/Yahoo Finance, Google News, Amazon, etc. etc. -- they all require more clicking.Today I realized two things.
- You can hotkey your way straight to the search box in Firefox by pressing Ctrl-K.
- Once in the Firefox search box you can change search engines via keyboard by pressing Alt-Up/Down.
Sphere It
| 
Digg it
| 
Bookmark it
| 
Stumble it
| 
Facebook it
A lesser life changing event occurs once you begin using quick searches.
examples (in location bar, ie, Ctrl-L)
ifl infectious greed (google's I'm feeling lucky which brings me here)
wp neural net (wikipedia search on neural net)
nf boiler room (netflix search on boiler room)
General process.
1) Conduct a search on some website.
2) Bookmark the url.
3) Open organize bookmarks
4) Rightclick properties that bookmark
5) Keyword to whatever your trigger is (ifl, wp, nf)
6) Replace whatever you searched for with %s (ie, I bookmarked boiler room, look for boiler+room in the URL and replace it with %s).
And if you've still got a modicum of mad hacker skillz, you can add &esrch=BetaShortcuts to your Google search and guess what?
Keyboard navigable Google results. How KRAZY is that!?!
See here:
http://lifehacker.com/software/google/navigate-google-search-results-via-keyboard-shortcuts-261157.php#c1483827
Oh the essential one. Ctrl+[number] to get to the tab you want quickly. Sorry this one's obvious, but it's at the ctrl-k level. And one of the reasons I still can't drop Firefox.
btw, did you catch the Portfolio.com article on Daniel Loeb? not too interesting, but still worth looking at.
I didn't know about Alt-Up/Down, but as a general note, F4 is the generic Windows shortcut for "display combo box options", and also works in Firefox's search bar. As a bonus shortcut, Ctrl-L acts just like Ctrl-K, but for the location bar instead of the search bar (and should provide some insight on why the shortcut for search is "K"). When I use Internet Explorer, Ctrl-L is usually the first thing I miss.