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Firefox Facts

Search from the Address Bar in Firefox

Posted: September 10, 2008 | Filed Under Settings, Usability

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. 

awesome-bar

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.

| More

Related Firefox Tips and Tricks

Change Your Default Search
Change Default Search in Firefox
Tired of having Google as the default search engine in Firefox? Maybe it is another search engine’s turn to be on top?! If you feel the urge to dethrone Google as the default search engine for your Firefox

Editing Bookmarks to Add Search Features
Turning a Bookmark into a Search Tool
Bookmarks in Firefox have a very powerful feature that most people don’t know about. Let’s take a look at this: Click on Bookmarks. Right-click on any bookmark you have there. Choose properties. Now, third from the top, there is a text box called “Keyword”.

saved-passwords-firefox
Search Through Your Saved Passwords
This is one of those “under the radar, but still cool” features of Firefox 3 I haven’t heard much praise about.  You can now search through your saved password information.  This is great for those of us who often forget

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  • trajan
    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.
  • Thank you for your help. I have been looking for this feature for a long time. And it is working very well infact. Thanks
  • 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)
  • I have the same issue with OpenDNS. I hate that they do that.
  • 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.
  • Not sure, I think OpenDNS over-rides your other settings, but might need to check with them first on this one.
  • Will this work if you are using OpenDNS? Its not working on my system - it takes me to opendns search.
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