One particularly nice feature of Mozilla Firefox is the way in which you can now search almost any search-enabled website by typing in the name and the search terms.

It works through specially crafted bookmarks. Let's take e2 as an example. It's common knowledge that a link like http://www.everything2.org/?node=banana will take you to a node named 'banana', if one should exist. What Firefox allows you to do is to take this bookmark, give it a keyword, like e2, swap out banana for %s - "%s" acts as a placeholder - and save it. In fact, go to %s and bookmark it right now!

Lets take you though the process one step at a time. Firstly, you need to get a URL with the search term in. Some sites might mung the address bar, and the original search string might not be present - or if present, might not have the desired effect if changed! Streetmap.co.uk does this, but looking at the HTML source of the page and working out what the name of the various form entries are, the URL can be reconstructed.

So you have a URL: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8392, for example; a Red Hat bug. Lets say you want "rhbug 999" to take you to bug #999. Copy the URL, and click Bookmarks, Manage Bookmarks....

Click on a bookmark within the category you want your quicksearch in, and click the "New Bookmark..." button. A dialog comes up with a few different options. Name is the name that'll appear on the Bookmark if selected from the menu; some early versions used to have a bug which meant that if this matched the keyword, the quick link would fail. Location is the modified URL, in our case, http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=%s. Keyword is the name of our keyword: rhbug. Everything else can go hang.

Voilá! By typing 'rhbug 191' you go to bug #191! By typing 'e2 e2 scratch pad' you can instantly got to the scratch pad! 'e2 Tom Dissonance' takes you to Tom Dissonance's homenode. 'e2 node heaven' takes you... you can guess where.

But it doesn't end there! Oh, no. Firefox comes equipped with two quick searches for Google (one normal, one I'm Feeling Lucky, under the name of 'goto'), Dictionary.com ('dict'), and stock quotes under 'quot'.

Customised searches can also be made; say you need to quickly search the University of Durham's website for references to badgers, but their internal search is slow? You could just type 'google site:dur.ac.uk badgers', or could easily make a custom search name 'durham' which has the site portion of the URL already contained.

And it isn't restricted to search based information: tying the keyword "rfc" to the URL http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc%s.html would allow quick and easy access to RFCs via number.

Other potentially useful bookmarks:
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s IMDB search
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s Yahoo search
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=%s Google image search
http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=%s Thesaurus.com search
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newsearch.srf?name=%s&type=PostCode: UK Postcode locator (via Streetmap.co.uk)
http://www.everything2.org/?node=%s E2 Search