it…out

If you use the firefox browser, these quick searches might be handy. Otherwise you’d better get out your I-don’t-care hat again.

Firefox supports “Quick searches,” which in a nutshell means that if I type “google david letterman” into the address/url bar, I will get the results of a google search on David Letterman. It doesn’t stop there: if I type “dict algorithm” I get dictionary.com’s definition of the word algorithm. If you don’t like dictionary.com, type webster instead of dict to get the Merriam-Webster definition.

That’s great, but sometimes I want to do more than scour the web for Japanese stuffed toys and look up the true definition of facetious. What if I want information on a TV show or movie? www.imdb.com have all sorts of such information.

I want to be able to type “tv futurama” into the address/url bar and get tvtome’s futurama page. Here’s what I did:
Go to Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks…->New Bookmark…

Name: TV Tome quick search
Location:http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/Search?searchString=benson&searchType=all
Keyword: tv
Description: Type “tv ” in the addressbar to perform a tvtome look-up

And that’s it.

For imdb, use this for Location: http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s

From here you should be able to make quick searches for whatever websites yo u want. To figure out what to put for the Location secion of the bookmark, view the source of the page you are trying to search and see how its search method is invoked. Viewing the source of www.tvtome.com told me that I needed to supply two arguments: searchString and searchType, while imdb only required one argument.