Tuesday's Tech Tip: More fun with Firefox

Here's another tip for Firefox users.

Do you see the search field in the upper right of your Firefox window? See the big "G" icon in it? That's the icon for Google. That means that Firefox will do a Google search for anything you type in that field when you hit "Enter" or the little magnifying glass icon.

Today we'll talk about tricking out that function so it's personalized to you.

Managing your search engines

Google is great, but there are other things I search for regularly. I search on Merriam-Webster (for definitions), Wikipedia (for general knowledge stuff) and Amazon.com (for books).

Click on that Google icon. You see those other search engines? Click on one (I think Yahoo might be one of the defaults). See how it changed the icon in your search box? Now anything you type in that search field will search Yahoo (or whatever you selected) instead of Google. Go ahead and try it.

Now click on that icon again. See where it says "Manage search engines"? Click on that.

In the window that popped up, click on any search engine you don't want to use and then click on Remove.

Now let's add some search engines you want. In your Manage search engines window, click on Get more search engines. A new page will open with search engines you can add. You'll see everything from A9 (Amazon.com's search engine) to Wikipedia. You can add any search engine that catches your eye by clicking on it.

The thing is, the list on that page isn't complete. You might be an eBay fanatic. Wouldn't it be cool to have that as a search engine so you can do a quick search of eBay right from your search bar?

Look at the bottom of that page. Under "Additional Resources" you'll see a link to mycroft.mozdev.org. Click that link and you'll find hundreds (if not more) of search engines you can add to the Firefox search bar just by clicking on the names of search engines that interest you.

Go ahead and install any search engines you want. If you click "start using right away" on the install window that pops up, you're good to go. Otherwise you need to restart Firefox.

Using your search engines

No big deal, you just click on the icon in the search bar, select the search engine you want, and then type in searches to your heart's content, right?

Right. But there's a neat trick you can use to find info on the fly. Click on your search engine icon and make sure Google is selected (the "G"). Now, let's say you're reading something on a website and come across this passage:

About one-fifth of the DNC's delegates are superdelegates at this time. Do I understand this correctly?

Now let's say you're interested in superdelegates. Highlight the word with your mouse (you can do this quickly by simply double-clicking the word). Highlighted? Good. Now right-click with your mouse on the highlighted word. This brings up your "context-sensitive" menu. See where it says "Search Google for superdelegates"? Click that.

You just performed a blindingly fast search of Google that was both on-demand and required very little work to interrupt your train of thought.

Where it gets neat is that it will search with whatever search engine is currently active. So if eBay is your active search engine (you'll see a little eBay icon instead of Google's "G"), highlighting a word or phrase will search eBay with that text.

This makes searching Wikipedia, Amazon.com, or whatever very, very convenient.

Bonus tabs tip

Have you been fooling with the tabs feature in Firefox? Check this out: You can change the order of the tabs just by clicking on the tab and dragging it to the place you want.

Remember our earlier example of researching a new TV? You can re-order those tabs so all the reviews come first and the product pages from online stores come last.

Have fun with Firefox and remember, post labels are your friend! If you want to see all of our tips, you can click the underlined word "tips" under this post to see all of our tips.

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