Power Up those searches in Firefox

Firefox has many good features and one of them is the ability to search the web from within the browser. If I remember it right, it is Firefox that introduced this feature first amongst the browsers.

Firefox comes with Google Search set as the default search engine. You will find this Search Bar plugin next to the ‘Address Bar.   How many of you know that you can add other search engines too to the side bar? Take a look at the picture.

• Click on the ‘Down Arrow’ mark next to the Google favicon in the search bar. You will find the ‘Manage Search Engines’ option.
• A new window opens with a ‘Get more search engines’ option.
• When you click on it you are taken to Firefox Search Engine extension  ’s page. Choose the one you need and you are done. You can add as many search engines as you want. And manage them too.
• While on the ‘Manage Search Engine’ window, select a search engine. Various options like ‘Edit Keyword’, ‘Move up’, ‘Move down’ and ‘Remove’ appear.
• Selecting the move up or move down option moves the selected add-on up or down in the list. This way you can move your frequently used search bar add-on to the top of the list.  A search engine selected can be removed from the list by clicking on the ‘Remove’ button.
• An interesting option here is the the ‘Edit Keyword’.  Click on the ‘Edit Keyword’ and you can assign a key word to that search engine.  For example, assign ‘ans’ to Answers.com and in the address bar when you enter ‘ans word’, Firefox takes you to Answers.com to help you find the ‘word’ overriding the default search engine that is set.  (Replace the ‘word’ with any word of your choice and try.)

Some times  ‘Show suggestions’ option could be annoying.  Put the cursor in the search bar, right click and in the context menu  un-check the ‘Show suggestions’ option.  That feature is turned off.  You can enable it later by undoing the previous option.