Power Up Searching with CyberSearch

Comments (1) · July 3, 2008 at 10:08 am · Firefox Settings, Firefox Usability

Is Firefox 3’s search functions not powerful enough for you?

If you’d like to power it up some, you need to pick up CyberSearch.  This extension allow you to perform various Google searches right from the address bar.  The fun doesn’t stop there.  It also displays the results in the awesome bar format along with your history.

You can do a number of special searches too, depending on the keywords that you use. You can do a Web Search, Local Search, Video Search, Blog Search, News Search, Book Search, Image Search, or Patent Search.

If you still need help wrapping your mind around this tool, be sure to check out the video tutorial on it they have put together for you.

Pick up this Firefox add-on on the Firefox Add-ons site or from CyberNet News.  Also big congrats to Ryan and Ashley for putting out such an awesome Firefox extension!  Great job!

Search Through Your Saved Passwords

Comments (2) · June 13, 2008 at 6:29 am · Firefox Usability

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 what login we used with what web site and don’t want to go scroll happy going down the list to maybe find the right result.

To check it out, go to Tools, Options and then the Security Tab.  Then click on the “Saved Passwords…” button under the Passwords section. 

The rest of it is pretty self explanatory.  Type the phrase your looking for in the search box, and the list will get shorter. 

Use Google’s New Favicon in Your Search Box

Comments (4) · June 5, 2008 at 3:00 pm · Firefox Hacks

Do you really love the new Firefox favicon that was released a short while ago?  Well, thanks to a little shifting around of Firefox’s internal organs Mozilla Links has come up with a way you can update your search box’s Google favicon to match.  Here are the instructions:

• Locate the searchplugins folder in your Firefox install folder. (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ on Windows).
• Open the google.xml file with a text editor.
• Locate a section that starts with <Image width=”16″ height=”16″>. You will see it is followed by a long series of characters (the encoded Google icon).
• Replace it with this equally unreadable code: the new encoded Google icon. Ensure the closing </Image> stays there.
• Save the file and restart Firefox.

If your picky about this sort of thing, or you just really love the new look this is a quick and easy hack to do.  Also check out Mozilla Links for more information on this awesome tip.

Hyperwords - Interact with ANY Text on the Web

Comments (2) · April 18, 2008 at 6:23 am · Firefox Usability

The best way I can describe Hyperwords is a way to super charge your searching via your right-click menu in Firefox. Think of being able to select any word on a page and being able to search for images of that word. You could be looking at this article here, select the word “Mozilla” and go to their Wikipedia entry.

There are so many different word interactions and lookups you can do (plus you can add your own) this is really a power tool that ads much to the Firefox experience. Here is a video demo of some of the features that the Hyperwords extension adds:

To learn more, be sure to check out their handy user guide they have posted, as it covers many of the basic questions you might have about it. Hyperwords is quickly becoming one of my favorite Firefox additions.

Mahalo Follow

Comments (2) · February 21, 2008 at 10:05 am · Firefox Usability

I am a big fan of Mahalo - an alternative to your traditional search engine. I didn’t have a clue until now though that they had a toolbar too. Mahalo Follow gives you all kinds of goodies to help you use Mahalo and a handful of other bonus services.

Some of the features of Mahalo Follow for Firefox are:

• You can quickly recommend links to Mahalo for search results
• Share your recommended links on Twitter, Faves, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, Stumble Upon and more.
• Follow Mahalo results from the toolbar
• Follow links and do a little random browsing of the Web, based on links to relative content

For those of you not up on what Mahalo is, it is a human powered search engine. All the search results are put together by the community, and by doing it this way you can often get results that make much more sense and that are at a higher level of relevancy than your traditional searches.

Pick up Mahalo Follow for yourself. If your a fan of the Mahalo search, I would highly recommend it as a useful addition to that Web tool.

Bookmarks by Chore or Subject?

Comments (1) · February 17, 2008 at 7:09 pm · Bookmark Help

Sort your bookmarks by task and not by subject. Over time I have learned to depend less and less on my bookmarks for getting me around the Web. Instead of searching through my bookmarks for the link I was wanting to browse again - I’ll just type it into the Google search box in Firefox if it was that hard to remember.

Most of the time, I can just type it into the address bar faster or get there another way (such as RSS subscriptions via Google Reader).

The few times I do use bookmarks, it is to check through a series of links for a task and not a subject. For an example, I have a social network folder in my bookmarks bar. There I have all my MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Hulu and other social-like sites. In another, I have my “site stuff” folder which has my Google AdSense, Google Analytics, FeedBurner and other links relating back to my various web projects.

So is my habit weird or do you find yourself doing the same?

Add 110+ Searches with termBlaster

Comments (1) · January 28, 2008 at 6:59 am · Firefox Usability

If just a handful of searching up in your search bar doesn’t cut it for you or if you want to remove your search bar to reclaim space, termBlaster is the super searching extention that will have you looking for things you never knew you could look.

Here is a little more about the Firefox extension from the developers:

termBlaster adds the ability to perform searches from your right-click (or context) menu using one of 110+ websites that range from search engines to encyclopedias to translators. Website lists are in XML format and can be modified in Places.

One would think that speed could come into play when trying to navigate through the search menus but you can do so quickly with little or no effort at all. All you do is highlight and right click the word you want to search and then select the search engine you want to use. They have shopping searches, review searches, torrent searches, map searches, too many to name.