The other day, when we were talking about bringing Chrome features into Firefox, the topic “searching from the address bar” was mentioned. By default, when you type a word into the address bar by itself, it gives you Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” number one result.
What if you just want to do a regular Google search?
There is an easy way to turn your address bar into a Google search box. You want to type into your address bar about:config. Next, type into the filter keyword.URL. Once you have found it there, modify the string in there and replace it with:
http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=
From now on, when you type in a word or phrase into the address bar and hit enter, it will launch a Google search for it rather than giving you Google’s top result for that word or phrase.
Will this work if you are using OpenDNS? Its not working on my system – it takes me to opendns search.
Not sure, I think OpenDNS over-rides your other settings, but might need to check with them first on this one.
Any reason to do this instead of searching from the search bar? It seems like it would clutter up your History to have URL’s/Titles mixed in with a bunch of keyword searches.
I have the same issue with OpenDNS. I hate that they do that.
Doesn’t bother me. I used the keyword field in the bookmark editor to implement Konqueror/Opera-like “gg: search terms” and so on. (I’ve also got Google Images, YouTube, and BitTorrent shortcuts)
Thank you for your help. I have been looking for this feature for a long time. And it is working very well infact. Thanks
For those of you (like me) that have openDNS…there are work arounds to get this functionality. Install greasemonkey and head for userscripts.org. There are 2 scripts there that are useful for openDNS users. One of them will take w/e is typed into the location bar, the other will do a regular google search. You can find both of them by searching for opendns on the userscripts site. Hope that helps.