Adding keyword based site searches to browser

Have you ever wondered how typing "wiki mahatma gandhi" in your firefox browser's location bar redirects you to Gandhi's wiki page? Don't you think searching content on some sites you visit regularly by typing stuff directly in your browser without going to Google or Bing makes it lot easier? Here is a simple tutorial to add custom search engines to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Before we get started, make sure to have the following items ready. Pencil, sharpener, eraser, ruler and a sheet of paper. Lol, I'm just kidding. All you need is your computer with a browser, Firefox or Chrome. In this tutorial, I will add keyword based search feature for my blog site on the above mentioned browsers. For this I will be using the search box provided for the blog site by Blogger.

Google Chrome
To add custom search feature on Chrome, you will have to identify the search url first. You can do that by doing a dummy search. In the figure below, for search query "table" the url is identified by the box highlighted on the top (http://psychesvisage.blogspot.com/search?q=table). Replace the query string with a %s and that will be your generic search string pattern. In our case, it will be "http://psychesvisage.blogspot.com/search?q=%s". Let's call this search query url.

Now, you may either type "chrome://settings/searchEngines" in your browser address bar or right click on the address bar of your browser and hit "Edit search engines.." as shown below.

This would open a page as shown below. Under "Other Search Engines", populate an empty row with the your site name, a keyword and the search query url we talked about earlier. In my case, I filled the row with "Psyche's Visage", "blog", search query url we identified earlier. 

Now, all I have to do is type "blog gandhi" in the address bar of the browser to search for all my blog posts related to Gandhi on a Google Chrome browser.

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is a lot easier to deal with for our problem. All you have to do it right click on the search bar in your webpage, and hit on the option "Add a Keyword for this Search..." as shown below.

This would bring up a dialog box for creating Bookmark. Fill in the required details and save. In my case, I filled the values "Psyche's Visage" and "blog" for name and keyword respectively. 

Now I can search for content related to "Nehru" on my blog by typing "blog nehru" in the address bar of my Firefox browser as well.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Google Chrome for Blogging

We all know how the web browser from Google, Chrome, achieved huge popularity with in a very short span of its release. Chrome's popularity can be attributed to its light weight and speed apart from its friendly bookmarking feature and task manager capabilities. Now, Chrome has extended its capabilities further by introducing a Web store for apps (add-ons from third party).

Couple of days ago I have written a guest post at Latest Tech Tips maintained by Harshad, a technology blogger and Java developer. Please find my post below.

Google Chrome Apps For A Better Blogging Experience

It talks about how these apps can be used to make your blogging experience a better one. Go ahead and explore the app store.