Quick Search

I finally figured out just how short life is and I'm in the process of consolidation. I'm retiring my personal website and moving over to free blogs. I had a page on my site that is still relevant and useful about something called Quick Search. Here's an updated version:

Most web browsers today allow you to perform site-specific searches or "macros" from the address bar.  Internet Explorer was the first one implementing such a feature that I was aware of many years ago called IE Quick Search (as a "Web Accessory" for IE4 and standard functionality in IE5).  Essentially, you could navigate to and search on a website in one step by typing a command like this into the address bar:

imdb Being There

By typing this into the address bar, you'd be taken to imdb.com to see the search results for the movie, "Being There."  Nice time saver. It was a powerful feature in a time before Chrome and unified "Omnibar" address bars.

Omnibars configured to search on Google come close to replacing Quick Search, but there's still the extra step of visiting Google before getting to your destination site. For that reason alone, Quick Search is still valuable.

IE QuickSearch

IE Quick Search was configured via registry entries. At the time, I put together a registry file with a bunch of useful macros. I haven't tested them in a long time.  I'm sure half work and half don't.  Come to think of it, this little reference sheet is an interesting test of the hows and whys of web UI and API stability, to some degree.

Here's the registry file to import Quick Search commands
Here's a reference sheet for the Quick Search commands

If you look at the registry file, you'll quickly see that %s in a URL is replaced by whatever the user searches for, such as "Being There" in the example above.

Other Browsers

In the past, if you told Firefox to import IE settings, you'd get the Quicksearch entries. I suspect this is still true and perhaps Chrome does it too.  You'll have to find out for yourself.

If you want to create new entries manually:

Chrome:  Go to Tools > Settings > Search Engines.  Here, you can add keywords and URLs with %s for the search term placeholder.

In Firefox, you add keywords to bookmarks.
Firefox: Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks.



To create your own Quick Searches, you'll need to figure out how to compose the URL and where to put the %s token.  Usually, you can do a search on a site and then look for the keywords you entered in resulting page's URL.  Sometimes though, you'll need to do some extra work if the page is posted or the site redirects or the data is obfuscated, etc..  It's not my intent to teach these things in this post.

Quick Search can also be useful for searching your personal or business web applications. Furthermore, you could create macros that actually do work instead of search for things.  Quick Search macros could send text messages, add items to databases, create events, etc..

Oh, there was a site that came along a long time ago that took the idea of Quick Search to a new level.  I'll try to find them and update the post.