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Search the web from your address bar

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

  • Updated:

If you’re constantly searching the web you must be tired of always following the same procedure: open up a website, click on the search field to activate it, enter the keywords and press enter. Well, I’m glad to tell you this tiring task can be reduced to just one step with a very simple trick that enables you to search from the address bar. Let’s see how it works with Softonic as example.

The first thing you need to do is bookmark a search page. In this case, we’ll search for anything on Softonic and bookmark the resulting URL, naming it with something like Search or similar.

Search the web from the address bar

See the “winamp” bit at the end of the URL? That’s the word we used to search for this given piece of software, but we’ll need to replace it with a variable if we want to use the search function with anything. So open the bookmark’s Properties menu, replace the search term you used with %s and enter the keyword you’ll be using from now on to trigger the search tool.

Search the web from the address bar

Done! Now you can search Softonic by simply entering softonic + your search term.

Search the web from the address bar

Note that this trick works in other sites as well. I used it with Youtube, for example, and now I can search for videos just by entering “youtube” and a keyword in my browser’s address bar. Also, remember that Firefox has a great search plug-in system that enables you to search a variety of sites from the browser’s interface. You can read more about Firefox built-in search engine and learn how to add any search field to Firefox.

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

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