I was talking to a friend about Chrome concerning the way they unified the search and address bar.  I have a variety of search engines in Firefox/IE that I use so I frequently go to the search bar, type in what I want, choose the relavent engine, then hit bombs away.  However, it turns out there’s a far faster and far better way of doing this in Firefox coupled with a handy shortcut key.

In the first place, control+L will take you directly to the address bar in every browser EXCEPT IE.  Couple this with smart keywords and you have a killer way to basically move to an all keyboard solution to searching quickly and effeciently.

Visit the page that has the search field that you search with. Right click on the search field. Choose Add a Keyword for this Search… The Add Bookmark dialog will appear. Give the bookmark a name, e.g. “IMDB Search” and create a keyword e.g. “imdb” and file the Bookmark somewhere. Firefox comes with a Quick Searches folder so you could use that. Click OK

Now enter imdb Matchstick Men into the Location bar and press Enter. You’re done! You can repeat these steps for any searches you use – e.g. Amazon, your corporate phonebook, your favorite bittorrent site, anything!

So now, what you can do is have google set as something like “g” and then hit control+L then type “g cats” and it would run a google search on cats.  Run a similar setup for wikipedia, youtube, etc and you have this really cool shorthand search method!

Thanks to Hammeron for the tip!