Custom Search Engines for Firefox
I created a little Firefox search engine add-on for LDSMedia (a company with which I am affiliated with through Provo Labs). (LDSMedia is a search engine site with tons of indexed LDS content –wonderful for doing LDS research, study, lesson preparation, etc.)
Anyway, now you can search LDS content right from your Firefox browser by installing this little plugin. It’s super easy. After following my link, just click on the “LDSMedia” link (note the CAPS), click “OK”, then find the new option in your list of search engines in Firefox.
So now great LDS content is searchable without needing to go to the site first. Cool, right? I use this type of search engine plugin a lot when I want to look up a word on Wikipedia. Why should you make one for your site? It saves a step, it’s convenient for your readers, and it’s good way to increase exposure for your company –or in this case LDS content in general. I imagine we’ll be creating plugins for each of our search engines.
I thought that creating the plugin would be kind of tricky, but it’s really just a small script, and the Mozilla Search Plugin Documentation is really quite thorough. So I just followed the instructions in the quick start; it was mostly copy-and-paste with a few values changed.
So there you have it, Firefox search plugins for fun and profit!
If you liked this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Tags: Custom Search Engines, Extensions, Firefox, Internet, Online Marketing, Plugins, Search Plugins, Technology
May 19th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
That’s really cool.
I’ll have to give it a try. Who knows, It might become part of my Firefox-bag-of-tricks.
May 20th, 2006 at 9:26 am
Awesome Jordy. I gave it a try and it worked perfectly.
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:49 am
In Opera 9 setting up this kind of search is fairly easy:
Surf over to ldsmedia.com (or any search engine).
Right-click on the search terms box.
Choose “Create Search”
In the dialog box that opens, type a name for your search, and a letter or word to use as a keyword.
Normally that’s all that’s needed to create a search for most sites. Since the ldsmedia search box has some JavaScript magic around it, you’ll need to click on the “Details >>” button, and in for the URL, put ”
http://www.ldsmedia.com/%s&type=all”
Now you’re ready to search. Suppose you chose ‘ldsm’ as your keyword. Once you’ve gone through these steps, any time you want to search ldsmedia.com you just type in the address bar: ‘ldsm [search terms]‘
Using the other such search accelerators provided by Opera have been ingrained in my muscle memory. g [search terms] hits google, c [search terms] hits CPAN, etc, etc. Opera 9 makes it easy to set up as many of these as you want.
FWIW,
– Dan