Firefox: Keyword Shortcuts 2019

Table of Contents

For years I’ve had shortcuts in Firefox. In this example, I’ve long been able to type i thing in my URL-bar and it would immediately take me to a google image search for “thing”. In the past this was added by right-clicking “search” on some page and selecting “add a shortcut for this search”. At some point, though, that went away. The functionality is now hidden a little, and you solve it with bookmarks (which I also haven’t used in any form for years). Instructions still worked here: https://superuser.com/questions/830806/how-to-create-keyword-shortcuts-for-firefox-searches

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How I made my Duck Duck Go (DDG) image search whenever I type “i thing” in my url:

  1. Bookmark a search page for DDG.
  2. Find and edit that bookmark in the firefox bookmarks (default key to get there: C-b)
  3. Use a %s to represent whatever you type in the future in the URL string, like so: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s&atb=v173-1&ia=images&iax=images (see the ?q=%s part in there? That’s all I added)
  4. Told it I wanted “i” as my keyword

Done. Now whenever I start my url with “i” (space), I launch a DDG image search for my thing.

Tory Anderson avatar
Tory Anderson
Full-time Web App Engineer, Digital Humanist, Researcher, Computer Psychologist