The Firefox address bar can do more than just search the internet and pull up URLs. In the latest version of Firefox, you can now create customized shortcuts to access or search any website. If you frequently find yourself using the “site:” modifier in your Google searches, this one’s for you.
What Are Firefox Shortcuts?
Usually, when you want to search a website, you have two options. You can use the in-built search feature within the website, or you can run a global search on Google by limiting the search results to that particular website. So if you want to search for How-To Geek on Google, you could run a search like your query site:.com and that’ll only show you results from How-To Geek.
It works fine for one-off searches, but what if you have to frequently scan websites like this? It gets clunky and tedious. With the new Firefox update, instead of typing out a query along with the search modifier, you can just type a shortcut and your query next to it.
You could search YouTube by typing something like this in the address bar yt orange cats or Reddit with rd cool wallpapers. Pretty neat. And the best part is, this works for any website that has a search feature.
How To Create a Search Shortcut For Any Website
To load a custom search engine into Firefox, you only need one thing: the search query URL. Take note of the URL when you search for anything on YouTube. It should look something like this.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cat+videos
Let’s try Reddit too.
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=cool+wallpapers
Finally, this is the URL How-To Geek uses for search.
https://www..com/search/?q=android
Do you see the pattern here? The query comes after the equal sign, but the rest of the URL remains the same every time. That’s the part we want to program into our browser.
Open your Firefox settings (the hamburger menu > Settings) and move to the search tab. Alternatively, open this link:
about:preferences#search
Scroll down to the Search Shortcuts section and click the “Add” button. Give your custom search engine its name and a keyword.
Remember the keyword is how you will launch that particular search engine in the address bar, so either type an @ before the keyword so you don’t accidentally pull it up while typing something else or give it a unique name like yt. It’s easy to remember and quick to type.
Lastly, paste in that search URL we discussed, but make sure you remove the part after the equal sign. Remove that, and replace it with %s which will tell Firefox this is where the query goes. It should look like this.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s
Then click Add Engine. To test it, simply type yt in the search bar (or whichever keyword you chose) and it should instantly turn into a search engine chip.
A Shortcut For Creating Shortcuts
If manually finding and typing URLs is too cumbersome for you, here’s a shortcut for creating these shortcuts. First, open the target website and find its search bar. For example, load IMDb and right-click on its search bar. You should see “Add Search Engine” in the right-click context menu. Click it. Now all you have to do is give it a keyword just like you did before. I assigned it “imdb,” and with that you just have to type imdb in the Firefox address bar to search IMDb directly. It should work for any website that has a functional search bar.
My Shortcut Starter Pack
You can do the same with Reddit or How-To Geek, just be sure to overwrite your query with the “%s” placeholder. I’ll share search shortcuts I use, and you can copy the URLs and create your own easily.
For Pinterest, I use the keyword “pin” and use this template URL for the shortcut.
https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=%s
For Gmail, I use the trigger “gm” and this URL:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/%s
For Google Drive my keyword is “gdrive” and it works on this URL. With that you
https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=%s
For Amazon, you can try the keyword “amz” and use the following URL.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%s
For Wikipedia, the trigger code “wiki” and this URL work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s
For Reddit, try “rd” as the keyword and the following URL for the browser shortcut.
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=%s
For Twitter, use tw and this URL
https://twitter.com/search?q=%s
Bonus tip: you can also use triggers like @history @tabs @bookmarks and @actions to quickly navigate Firefox features. The @actions shortcut brings up a helpful bunch of buttons, including a button for taking screenshots.
If you want to dig up the URL for any website of your choice, just run a random query through its search bar and copy the URL. Then just take out the query and replace it with a percentage sign and lowercase s.
