Web browsing is something most web users do very, very often. The Internet is an immense tool full of all sorts of data, instantly available at your fingertips. I frequently use websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Google, Discogs and more, all to quickly search for images, videos and information. It’s slow and cumbersome to have to load up each of these websites in order to just perform a search, so the best way to improve your overall web experience is to treat your web browser more like a search tool.
Firefox and Opera both have a built-in feature in which you can use keyword shortcuts to quickly search specific websites for information. When I was working for an ISP in Australia I found this extremely useful, not only just for searching for information on the web, but also for quickly searching for things on our Intranet and various in-house troubleshooting tools. In a moment’s notice I could have whatever information I needed up on screen without having to navigate to the Intranet, click on the tool, enter the information, submit and wait for the results. With one keyword I could have instant access to the results.
Consider a tool as powerful as Wikipedia, where you can search for just about anything or anyone and be presented with (mostly!) accurate information about that item. If you wanted to look up steganography for instance, most web users would do something like:
1. Click on the Wikipedia Bookmark
2. Wait for it to load
3. Use mouse to navigate to the Search box
4. Enter the word ’steganography’ into the search box
5. Click search or hit enter
Consider that with steps 1-4, you don’t really want to visit the Wikipedia front page; you only want to use its search features but in order to use them you had to visit the Wikipedia page first. It’s cumbersome, slow and annoying!
Imagine if you could access those websites with the following sequence instead:
1. Hit -L (to get to the location bar)
2. Type ‘wp steganography’
3. Hit enter.
You avoid having to go through the website’s front door and can go in straight to the results you want. It saves you so much time and you can use it on any website with a search box. You also don’t have to use any mouse clicks!
In order to take advantage of this on Safari, you need a plugin called Keywurl. It’s a bit irritating to install but once it’s done it will work like a charm.
To install and set up, do the following:
A: Download and install Keywurl
1. Download Keywurl
2. Open up the contents of the DMG file in Finder
3. Double-click the SIMBL package and follow the instructions to install
B: Create the Plugins Directory manually
4. Load up a new Finder window (press -n)
5. Navigate to: HOME/Library/Application Support
6. Create a new directory called ‘SIMBL‘ and navigate into it
7. Create a new directory (beneath SIMBL) called Plugins
C: Copy the Keywurl Plugin
8. Go to your Finder window containing the Keywurl files
9. Go into either the Leopard or Tiger directory, depending on which release of OS X you’re running.
10. Drag the Keywurl.bundle file into the SIMBL/Plugins directory you just created
11. Restart Safari and launch it
If you check your Safari preferences, Keywurl should now be installed!
Keywurl comes with a set of default keyword searches which you can add/modify/delete at your leisure. Try one out. Go to a Safari window’s location bar and type ‘imdb Jumper’ and it should take you to the IMDB.com results page for the search ‘Jumper’. It will work with multiple words of course, such as ‘imdb The Brady Bunch’.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
It’s pretty easy. If you do a Google search, you might notice that your URL will always look something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Safari&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
The part after q= is the interesting bit, because that’s what we’ve searched for. If you look at almost any other search results you will see something similar. All you need to do is create a new Keyword URL in the Keywurl preferences, give it a shortcut name, put in the URL just like the one above and then replace the keyword “Safari” with “@@@” which is what tells the script where to put the search string. In keywurl your Google search URL would look like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=@@@&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
You add these searches into Keywurl in Safari’s preferences, and the searches are stored in a file called Home/Library/Application Support/Keywurl/Keywords.plist so be sure to back that up.
Personally, I have shortened keywords and have added some more of my own. Here’s a list of the ones I use:
amazon http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index%3Dblended%26field-keywords%3D@@@
asx http://finance.google.com/finance?q=ASX:@@@
do http://www.discogs.com/search?type=all&q=@@@
ebay http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=@@@
ep http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aepguides.com%20@@@&btnG=Google+Search&btnI=745
flickr http://flickr.com/photos/tags/@@@
gg http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=@@@
ggi http://images.google.com/images?q=@@@
imdb http://imdb.com/find?s=all&q=@@@
map http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=@@@
mini http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=@@@
news http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=&q=@@@
thesaurus http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=@@@
tla http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/search.aspx?tab=32&charset=iso-8859-1&SearchBy=0&Word=@@@&TFDBy=0
wp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=@@@&go=Go
yt http://youtube.com/results?search_query=@@@
You can download my file and copy it if you wish.
To add one, just search for something on a website and copy the URL to the clipboard. Go into Keywurl and click the + button, type the keyword, press tab, and paste the URL. Replace the keyword you searched for with ‘@@@’. Make sure that if you’ve searched for something with two words, it will get replaced with ‘coca+cola’ or ‘coca%20cola’. You will need to replace that entire string with ‘@@@’.
GOTCHA’S
Watch out for some clever sites like Wikipedia which will always take you to the results page if there is only one hit. Search for something like ‘Japan’ in Wikipedia and you’ll be taken straight to the page on Japan. To find the URL, the trick is to search for something that it most likely won’t match and it will send you to a results page. Here you can grab that special URL. An example on Wikipedia is searching for something like ‘gadeo‘ which is a word I made up and so no page should exist.
TRICKS
Some sites don’t have their own search engines, so consider using Google to search them instead. For epguides.com for instance, go to Google and search for “site:epguides.com Frasier”. The URL you get is:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Aepguides.com+Frasier&btnG=Search&meta=
The magic for turning that into an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search is to add ‘&btnI=745′ to the end of the query, turning it into:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Aepguides.com+Frasier&btnG=Search&meta=&btnI=745
Have fun! Please remember to post your comments below about your experience with Keywurl, as well as any useful website you’ve made search shortcuts for!
