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Top 10 Firefox search engines

Posted in productivity, software, tips. Tagged with browsing, firefox, search engine, tips.

Quickly, tell me the web browser you use most frequently.

What? Do I hear anything other than Firefox? You’re most certainly way behind on our Productivity 101 lesson.

Quickly, tell me what’s your most frequent way to google or search stuff online.

If you tell me you click on Firefox’s address bar, type www.google.com then Enter, then you’re definitely not making good use of your time and fingers. There’s a better, faster, easier way to google from Firefox – the quicksearch field on the right-top corner. Just type Ctrl+K (or, on Mac, Cmd+K) and you’ve changed focus to the quicksearch field. Type what u want to search for, Enter, and Google opens up with the results.

But the best news is that from the quicksearch bar you can use many search engines in addition to the default Google one. After Ctrl+K, just press Ctrl+Down/Ctrl+Up (or, on Mac, Cmd+Down/Cmd+Up) to quickly pick another search engine from your list – you can use Yahoo, Ask, Wikipedia or many more – basically, any website can provide its own Firefox search engine. And.. this is where our title starts to make sense:

What are your top 10 Firefox search engines?

My favorite Firefox search engines make me lots more productive when conducting most internet research tasks. I’ll just show them briefly, but wait, in the comments, for your suggestions:

  1. Google – no comments required
  2. Yahoo – because Google sometimes is not relevant enough..
  3. Wikipedia – probably the most useful of them all – whenever you want actual info instead of just websites..
  4. Imdb – infos on movies
  5. Mininova – search for the films themselves :D
  6. YouTube
  7. Technorati
  8. del.icio.us – because sometimes Google and Yahoo are irellevant, and u might just want cool websites
  9. Flickr
  10. The Pirate Bay – Mininova alternative ;-)

What about you? What are the search engines you use on a daily basis?

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6 Responses

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  1. Vic said

    You can get many more search engines over here
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:4
    or on the mycroft mozilla page – http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

  2. Opera not only has been doing all of that longer, but does it better.

    If I want to search anything I search regularly, I type it in the address bar… like ‘g taco’ to search for taco from anywhere.

    Add in the speeddial page, which has my 9 most common sites on it that it refreshes and shows updates for (like quickly glancing at all 9)… and being able to navigate pages just by moving my mouse around… ‘right-click drag down (open new page) and from there start typing the url or your custom search.

    try it out

  3. Haga, Trondheim said

    why should I use firefox or opera??? I have never found anything I cant do with with explorer. Better speed they say!! well thats determined on a lot of other bottle necks than the browser

  4. I have some of the same search engines installed as you but I have others like amazon ebay, snap and creative commons.

  5. Da5id said

    Thanks for the crtl+k tip.
    Also, press ALT+D to transfer focus to the URL address bar.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Social media strategy and tech tips, now available through Firefox search linked to this post on March 29, 2010

    [...] you only use your search bar to search Google, read this great introduction to customizing your Firefox search bar to search many other web sites. Then visit the Firefox search collection to find more search tools [...]