Many people use a search engine to navigate the Internet. However, not everyone knows that Firefox’s1 “add keyword” feature allows one to directly search any website with an input field.
As for why this is useful:
Let’s take Wiktionary as an example, a multilingual dictionary.
Navigate to Wiktionary and right click Wiktionary’s input field. A menu will pop up.
Click the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” option. Firefox will now
present a dialog box asking for the name of the bookmark, the folder to
save the bookmark in, and a keyword (I chose wkt
).
Now, it’s possible to type in wkt
(or whatever was chosen as a
keyword) into Firefox’s search bar followed by a word and find its
definition. Here is an exercise to test it: figure out what the difference
between somnambulism and funambulism is, and why the two probably
wouldn’t go well together.
The ArchWiki, Wikipedia, and many other websites can be searched in this
fashion. In addition, keywords work with ordinary bookmarks too (for
instance, awl
is mapped to the “List of applications” ArchWiki
entry on my
computer). The main difference with regular bookmarks is that nothing is
typed except the keyword since a query is no longer being performed.
I prefer the bookmark method over adding a site as a search engine for two reasons:
Anything based on Firefox, such as Tor Browser, can also make use of this feature (assuming the fork is sufficiently up to date). ↩