I’ll give you a heads up that this extension is really just for those of you who heavily use the built-in Firefox search box. The Organize Search Engines extension will help remove some of the clutter from the search box drop-down menu.
How it works is rather simple. From the drop-down list you select the Manage Search Engines where you will be presented with a window to reorder the sites you currently have setup (on the left side of the screenshot above). In addition to being able to reorder the sites, you’ll also be able to create new folders to organize your search engines. Once done the end result will be a less cluttered menu of search engines (on the right side of the screenshot above).
This isn’t something that I would actually use myself because I hardly use that search box as it is. I have keywords setup so that I can always use the address bar to do my searching. How many of you actually use the browser’s built-in search box for searching a variety of sites?
Download the Organize Search Engines extension [via How-To Geek]
@Ryan:
I use Firefox search engine every I need to search for information while posting a blog entry. Normally I use Wikipedia search engine which is excellent. If that doesn’t work, then I switch to Google. 99.9% of the time these two search engines will satisfy my needs.
I don’t need a great deal of search engines to justify the Organize Search Engine extension. Maybe there are academics or college students that need to research great amounts of information who will need such an Add-on. Preparing a college research thesis is a good example.
Regards,
Omar.-
At one time I’d have jumped at this but for half a year I’ve not used the Firefox search box. For about four months I was using the Google Toolbar search box exclusively, but now I’ve even dropped that in favour of keyword searches. I just hit Alt+D to jump to the URL box, type g,w,v,i,f for Google, Wikipedia, Google Video, Google Images and Facebook respectively, type a query and hit Enter or Alt+Enter if I want it in a new tab. I can do the whole thing without using the mouse or even looking at the screen, much faster than selecting a search from the menu.
This is useful to me. I have near 15 search extensions, so it’s nice to be able to organize them.
Sounds like what my use normally is, but I just use keywords for those two.
Wow, you’re almost just like me! I have all of those same keywords setup except for the Facebook one, plus I have Yahoo under “y”.
I too use keywords for all my searches, but I didn’t know about Alt+Enter to open a new tab. That comment alone made this post worth it. I can already see my productivity (or lack thereof as the case may be) skyrocketing.
I may have to write up a separate post on that so more people are aware. Good call!
More over,
It would be very useful of we can have check boxes next to the engine name so we can look up the word(s) in many engines at time.
If some know so such an extension, plz tell us ??
That’s definitely an interesting idea. Unfortunately I don’t know how you would display the results in an efficient manner.
I rarely use the Firefox search box directly. The extension “Super DragAndGo” [[addons.mozilla.org]] allows me to select any text on a page and then drag it — which opens a new tab with search results from the currently selected engine.