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Emile comments on Open Thread: how do you look for information? - Less Wrong
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Comments (15)
Keyword searches are extremely useful.
I make excessive use of these, I can just type "i birch" in the address bar and get a google image search for "birch"
My keywoard searches include:
How do you create keyword searches?
In Firefox, it's explained here : http://robertnyman.com/2006/09/13/smart-keywords-in-firefox-are-outstanding/
In Chrome, it's explained here: http://lifehacker.com/5476033/how-to-set-keyword-bookmarks-in-google-chrome
In both cases, it boils down do associating a keyword with a search url of the form "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special%3ASearch", such that when you type "keyword whatever" in your search bar, %s in your search url is replaced by 'whatever'.
Combine this with the fact that adding "site:somewhere.com" in a google query restricts the search to that domain, you can make custom searches for any website (though in some cases, like wikipedia and stack overflow, the site's search function is more useful - for example, that wikipedia query up there will bring you directly to the page if it exists).
Seconded. I've been using dozens of these since Firefox introduced them circa 2006.
It's worth noting that there is also DuckDuckGo (a search engine), which has bang expressions for outsourcing results. Just to give some of the equivalents for those listed above: "!gi" for Google Images, "!yt" for YouTube, "!w" for Wikipedia, etc. To be sure, one has to rely on DuckDuckGo for adding the expressions (although I've had success suggesting a new expression before).
That Chrome link looks outdated. Chrome explicitly supports this feature now: Settings -> Search -> Manage search engines.
I used to do this but stopped for some mysterious reason I no longer remember.
It's also outdated in that Chrome no longer labels one of the items "keyword." The keyword is the middle column, which defaults to the domain of the search engine. At the bottom of the list, where you can add new searches, the items are labeled, but it listed every search form on every page I'd ever visited, so I didn't need to add them myself.
Keyword searches are amazing! However, I want to give heads up to some people - the default case of typing 'i' to search for images can be pretty annoying if you some times start searches with 'I' for whatever reason - so if you think that this might annoy you then change it to something else. The same is true for other cases where words are chosen as the keyword (e.g. you for youtube).
Some more details for Firefox users, to overcome trivial inconvenience:
(Optional step.) Make a "Quick Search" bookmark folder to separate quick searches from other bookmarks.
Go to LessWrong website and bookmark it. This way the bookmark will have a LW icon. Change the name to "Search: Less Wrong", the keyword to "lw", and the address to:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:lesswrong.com
And so on for your other favorite websites.
Now search for something by typing in the URL:
lw Open Thread